Faith’s Queer Pleasures: The Post-Civil Rights Politics of Race, Sexuality, and Christian Identity
by Carol L. Lautier-Woodley
B.A. in Women’s Studies, May 2006, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill M.A. in African American Studies, May 2008, Columbia University
A Dissertation submitted to
The Faculty of The Columbian College of Arts and Sciences of The George Washington University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy
January 10, 2019
Dissertation directed by
Erin D. Chapman Associate Professor of History and Women’s Studies
Joseph Kip Kosek Associate Professor of American Studies
The Columbian College of Arts and Sciences of The George Washington University certifies that Carol L. Lautier-Woodley has passed the Final Examination for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy as of August 22, 2018. This is the final and approved form of the dissertation.
Faith’s Queer Pleasures: The Post-Civil Rights Politics of Race, Sexuality, and Christian Identity
Carol L. Lautier-Woodley
Dissertation Research Committee:
Erin D. Chapman, Associate Professor of History and Women’s Studies, Dissertation Co-Director
Joseph Kip Kosek, Associate Professor of American Studies, Dissertation Co- Director
Jennifer C. Nash, Associate Professor of African American and Gender and Sexuality Studies, Committee Member
Gayle Wald, Professor of English, Committee Member
ii
© Copyright 2019 by Carol L. Lautier-Woodley All rights reserved
iii Acknowledgments
I am grateful to Kip Kosek, Erin Chapman, and Jennifer Nash for their support and guidance. I offer special thanks to Erin Chapman for helping me through the
final years of the writing process.
Thanks to Scott Larson for faithful friendship, beers, and many acts of kindness. I
am grateful, also, to Justin Mann, Joan Fragaszy Troyano, Emily Dufton, Meghan Drury,
Katie Brian, Kimberly Yates, and Brian Santana for moments of levity, good
conversation, and sound advice on navigating graduate school.
I offer appreciation and love for the support of all the friends and “holy trouble-
makers” who nurtured me as an academic, organizer, and person of faith: Michele
Berger, ABilly Jones-Hennin, Reverend Rodney McKenzie, Jr., Reverend Dr. Yvette
Flunder, Sylvia Rhue, Reverend Dr. Rebecca Voelkel, Reverend Candy Holmes, Bettina
Judd, Meredith Coleman Tobias, Robin Criffield, Evangeline Weiss, and Thérèse
Murdza.
I am indebted to everyone who held up me when I was diagnosed with breast cancer. Thank you for loving me back to health.
Lastly, my deepest gratitude to Hazel, Rosa, Louise, Robert, Evelina, Jake, Walter, and the rest of my wonderful family. You taught me the meaning of grace and you remain the smartest folks I know.
iv Abstract
Faith’s Queer Pleasures: The Post-Civil Rights Politics of Race, Sexuality, and Christian Identity
Faith’s Queer Pleasures studies the politics of Christian Identity in the post-civil- rights era to examine the silences and erasures that perpetuate the belief that people of faith are not lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender and that LGBT people are not people of faith. It also shows that silences and erasures have also made it possible for Christian segregationists and Christian civil rights activists to plausibly appeal to the same religious tradition. My dissertation, Faith’s Queer Pleasures: The Post-Civil Rights Politics of
Race, Sexuality and Christian Identity, therefore argues that Christian identity references no single moral position. Rather, Christianity derives its meaning from the dominant or normative condition that its believers seek to effect. The point of Faith’s Queer Pleasures is not to deny the truth of sincere religious conviction. Nor to suggest that religion-based biases are historically identical. Rather, it is to attend to the fact that religion functions identically to multiple and oppositional political ends. Although the project analyzes the activism of lesbian and gay Christians, I do not argue that Christian belief, identity, and practice were socially and politically liberatory in themselves. Rather, as tools they provided ways to press the boundaries of what it meant to be Christian and homosexual.
Each chapter examines the indeterminateness of Christianity—that is, the fact that
Christianity means different things to different people, that its meaning is conditioned by what it is asserted in relation to, and that we can better understand what religion means by simultaneously examining its intersection with race and sexuality and the social change people are working to achieve.
v Table of Contents
Acknowledgments...... iv
Abstract ...... v
List of Figures ...... viii
Introduction: Faith in the Politics Religion and of Identity ...... 1
The Intersection of Race, Religion, and Sexuality in Christian Community ...... 11
Identity and Christianity ...... 18
Recent Scholarship on Sexuality and Christianity ...... 21
Evangelical Christianity, Sexuality, and Social Reform ...... 26
Conclusion ...... 35
Chapter 1: If Jesus Is the Answer, What Are the Questions?: How Americans Use the Simple and Social Gospels in Social Reform Movements and the Politics of Christian Identity ...... 37
The Simple Gospel ...... 42
Explo ’72 ...... 48
The Social Gospel ...... 57
Conclusion ...... 64
“God Has His Hands on This Boy”: The Origins of Perry’s Affirming Faith ...... 82
“We’re Not Afraid Anymore!”: UFMCC and the Origins of LGBT Christian Activism ...... 90
The Civic Center Rally in Los Angeles, November 16, 1969 ...... 95
LGBT Christian Conversion: Faith in Race and Sexuality ...... 103
vi Conclusion ...... 106
Chapter 3: Race, Faith, and Sexuality in James Tinney’s Christian Identity Politics .... 109
From Identification to Identity ...... 112
Christian Identity Politics and Conversion ...... 129
Black Consciousness ...... 138
Conclusion ...... 153
Chapter 4: “The Homosexual Explosion” in The Body of Christ: Race, Conservative Christian Identity and Resistance to Gay Rights ...... 158
Creating a Color-Blind Christian Conservativism ...... 169
Washington for Jesus ...... 182
Conclusion ...... 196
Conclusion ...... 203
Bibliography ...... 209
vii List of Figures
Figure 1: Tinney and church leaders laying hands during prayer and asking for God to touch the person in need. From the private papers of Elder Michael Vanzant, of Tinney’s church, Faith Temple...... 130
viii Introduction: Faith in the Politics Religion and of Identity1
The National Gay and Lesbian Task Force’s (NGLTF) 1999 Creating Change
Conference featured a plenary entitled “Religion as an Agent of Social Change.”2
Reverend Ken South, plenary moderator, acknowledged that the LGBT community had been hurt and abused by religion, but he was quick to remind the audience of gay rights activists that many had also been hurt by the “petty politics of activism.” 3 He opened the session by sharing that people often pointedly asked: “Why, as an openly gay man, would you want to stay in a hostile institution?” And less thoughtfully: “Isn’t being a gay
Christian like being a Jewish Nazi?” He offered a quick and direct reply: “I was Christian for at least 16 years before I figured out I was gay [. . .] Why give up my power to those who are antigay?”4 For South, Christianity was an integral part of his identity, and one that pre-existed his equally important sexual awakening. He had been ordained in the
United Church of Christ (UCC) twenty-five years earlier. At the time of the plenary, he worked for NGLTF as the leader of its AIDS Initiative and served as director of the
1 The term “queer” in the title connotes pleasures of Christian Identity that challenge the heterosexist underpinnings of antigay evangelical Christianity. By contrast nonqueer pleasures of Christian Identity include, for example, demonization of LGBTQ people and championing their exclusion from the rights and protections of citizenship. 2 Creating Change is the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force’s annual conference; it has convened lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer organizers and allies in order to build the movement for LGBTQ equality for over thirty years. 3 The project uses the terms “LGBT,” “gay and lesbian,” and “gay” interchangeably. The term “queer” refers to points to a multiplicity of identities represented in the modern movement for equality: lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, as well as asexual, gender nonconforming, genderqueer, and intersex among others. No one term is able to represent the capaciousness of human sexual identity or behavior. For example, better language is needed to account for those whose sexual activity does not constitute a significant aspect of their individual identity—for example, men who have sex with men, MSM, is a term that public health scholars use to refer to men who, except for sex behavior, live otherwise heterosexual, heteronormative lives; MSM is not, however, a term by which people organize themselves. 4 The National Gay and Lesbian Task Force Presents: 12th Annual Creating Change Conference (audiocassette), 220A-220B, 1999.
1 National Religious Leadership Roundtable (NRLR), a multifaith coalition of lesbian, gay,
bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) people of faith and their allies. NGLTF started NRLR
as part of a national strategy to shift the faith narrative that dominated American politics:
that LGBT people were not people of faith and people of faith were not lesbian, gay,
bisexual, or transgender.5 NRLR, he shared, represented “tens of thousands of LGBT
people of faith” and many of them were social justice activists well before the beginning
of the modern gay rights movement. In the past year, however, gay rights organizations had been rocked by a national ad campaign launched by conservative evangelical
Christians, which depicted homosexuality as a moral defect that faith in Jesus Christ would “heal.”
In July 1998, Reverend Marion “Pat” Robertson’s Christian Coalition and fourteen other conservative religious organizations sponsored full-page advertisements that promised to turn homosexuals into heterosexuals through prayer and outmoded psychotherapeutic models rejected by the American Psychiatric Association, the
American Psychological Association, and the American Medical Association. On July
13, the New York Times ran “Toward Hope and Healing for Homosexuals.” Also featured in the Washington Post, USA Today, and newspapers across the country, the ad centered a picture of several ex-gays and the fifteen sponsoring organizations provided contact numbers for those seeking more information. Most prominently, though, were the image and words of “wife, mother, former lesbian” Ann Paulk, whose marriage to an ex-gay
5 The 1999 plenary was originally conceived to highlight the role of churches in social justice activism, but the emcee noted that the name had been changed to reflect the fact that many gays and lesbians attend synagogues and mosques and practice pagan religions. Nomenclature is its own kind of justice work. Founded in 1973 as the National Gay Task Force, what was then known as the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force changed its name to the National LGBTQ Task Force in 2015.
2 man, John Paulk, was at the center of the campaign. Molested at the age of four by a teenage boy, Paulk testified that by her teens she:
believed being feminine meant being weak and vulnerable. . . . I had so thoroughly rejected my own femininity that . . . I just wasn’t attracted to men sexually. I became drawn to other women. . . . While l longed for a female life- partner, I knew it just wouldn’t work. That’s when I prayed, “God please show me who You are, and fill the void in my heart.” . . . Leaving homosexuality was the hardest thing I’ve ever had to do. I finally saw the patterns of my same-sex attraction and came to understand the underlying needs that had sparked my longings. As I grew in my relationship with God, I knew He had changed me forever.6
Ann Paulk believed her sexual orientation was a pathological response to sexual trauma.7
The sponsoring organizations told readers that the message of the ad was “in the public interest” and represented “millions of American families.”8 Importantly, those who crafted her statement were careful to dispel any notion that religion-based homophobia was related to religion-based racism. This was necessary because many of the most prominent members of the Religious Right were white Christian conservatives and some moderates who had opposed the 1960s civil rights movement. Conservative evangelicalism was more racially diverse in 1998 than in 1968 in part because socially conservative black people strengthened antigay campaigns. In particular, the juxtaposition of white and black conservative Christians was used to suggest that opposition to homosexuality was a matter of religious belief and not merely another form of religious bigotry.
Ann Paulk’s ad began with a reference to blacks and whites who were in
6 Display Ad 8 -- No Title. 1998. New York Times: A11. 7 For a detailed analysis of the Ann Paulk’s ad, see: Janet R. Jakobsen and Ann Pellegrini. Love the Sin: Sexual Regulation and the Limits of Religious Tolerance (Boston: Beacon Press, 2003); PFLAG Call to Action. 1998. http://www.qrd.org/qrd/orgs/PFLAG/1998/call.to.action.in.aftermath.of.exgay.ad.campaign- 07.15.98. 8 Display Ad 8.
3 agreement about homosexuality. “I’m living proof that Truth can set you free. Recently
several prominent people like Trent Lott, Reggie White, and Angie and Debbie Winans
have spoken out on homosexuality . . . calling it a sin. When I was living as a lesbian I
didn’t like hearing words like that . . . until I realized that God’s love was truly meant for
me.”9 In a move that would have been unthinkable just two decades earlier, Paulk’s ad
aligned African Americans Reggie White and the Winans sisters with Mississippi Senator
Trent Lott, who had strong familial and political ties to the white supremacist group,
Counsel of Conservative Citizens. The ad is a useful example of the post-civil-rights era’s so-called “color-blind gospel,” with which evangelicals obscured the disturbing compatibility of Christian identity and discrimination.
Faith’s Queer Pleasures examines religion as one of the means by which people attempt to become agents within a limited sphere of possibility. Although faith-based activism moved lesbian and gay Christians toward intelligibility and agency, I do not argue that Christian belief, identity, and practice are socially and politically liberatory in themselves. Rather, as tools they provided ways to press the boundaries of what it meant to be Christian and homosexual. Further, Faith’s Queer Pleasures will demonstrate that the cultural conflict between gay-affirming and antigay Christians suggests that Christian identity references no single moral position: Christianity derives its meaning from the dominant or normative condition that its believers seek to effect. Faith’s Queer
Pleasures, therefore, studies the politics of Christian Identity in the post-civil-rights era in order to understand how Christianity lends itself so easily to both conservative and progressive social movements and what we can learn from how those movements reflect
9 Ibid.
4 cultural and political changes that resulted from the black civil rights movement. As Amy
Gutmann argued in Identity in Democracy, “Long before anyone coined the term identity
politics, groups organized around religious identities were powerful political forces, so
powerful in the West as to give rise to the sixteenth century Wars of Religion, which
serve as historical backdrop to democrats who defend the separation of church and
state.”10 Yet, whether religion is prophetic, as in the multifaith progressive politics of the
civil rights and antiwar movements of the 1960s, or reactionary, as in the white
supremacist patriarchy of the right-wing evangelical Christians, people of faith have used
religion to formulate answers to late twentieth-century debates about identity-related issues: race, gender, and sexuality.
Christians on either side of the gay rights struggle used Christian Identity as the basis for democratic action. Recent history gave precedence for doing so: segregationists such as Reverend Jerry Falwell affirmed racism using the same Bible that civil rights leaders such as Reverend Fred Shuttlesworth used to fight racism, even though
“proponents of slavery and, later, segregation typically applied a precept or chapter-and- verse approach to Bible evidence, opponents usually relied on principles derived from the
Bible.”11 The prominence of faith leaders in the Martin Luther King, Jr. era of the black
civil rights struggle, 1953–1968, inspired LGBT people to reclaim their faith in the
course of fighting for equality in the years that followed. Reverend South was speaking
of biblical principles when he reminded those attending the plenary that faith had inspired
many of them to social justice activism: “Your thirst for justice and equality came from
10 Amy Gutmann, Identity in Democracy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University, 2003), 151. 11 David Holmes, “(Re-)Dressing the KKK: Fred Shuttlesworth’s Precept Hermeneutic and the Rhetoric of African American Prophetic Patriotism,” Journal of Black Studies 42, no. 5 (July 2011), 812.
5 early understandings of God’s love for you and your responsibility to your neighbor.”12
Reverend Ken South and other gay and lesbian people of faith reclaimed the meaning and joy in being Christian. More importantly, they demonstrated that the
Christian church does not just dictate sexual morality; churches themselves are sites of contest over sex, race, and gender identity. LGBT people of faith, often reproached by conservative Christians, LGBT secularists, and heterosexist religious progressives, would seem to be the most unlikely religious activists. Yet, they are crucial to understanding how religious belief facilitates political conversions. In this project, LGBT Christians repented from acceptance of faith-based homophobia and began to believe that lesbians, gays, bisexuals, and transgender people were 1) loved by God and 2) therefore equally
deserving of the rights and protections of American citizenship. LGBT people of faith
became social and political evangelists in order to shift American religious discourse on
the subject of homosexuality. Many grew up in faith communities that taught one could
not be gay and love or be loved by God and therefore struggled to overcome same-sex
desire. By sharing their stories as part of the modern gay rights movement, they
evangelized the good news that they were completely loved and affirmed by God. Early
articulations of the good news of LGBT religious liberation often cited antiblack racism
to make the injustice of homophobia legible. Faith-based activists compared the gay
rights struggle to the black civil rights movement to suggest that the presumed triumph of
the latter portended well for the former.13
12 National Gay and Lesbian Task Force, 12th Annual Creating Change Conference. 13 The history of antiblack racism has been useful for opening conversations about other kinds of oppression. In the classic feminist article “Traffic in Women: Notes on the ‘Political Economy’ of Sex,” for example, Gayle Rubin, quoting Marx, invoked “the Negro,” the quintessential abject, and the cotton gin, the icon of modern industrialization, to succinctly demonstrate the social and temporal contingencies by which women become oppressed (158). Rubin then built an entire essay on the legibility of the connection
6 To be sure, sexuality is as unstable as race and any of the other identities around which people organized themselves. For both LGBT Christians and conservative evangelical Christians, religion was a social force with the power to transform “erotic commitments” into expressions of divine will, moral rectitude, and grounds for civic engagement. Faith’s Queer Pleasures examines the intersection of Christian Identity and late twentieth-century racial politics in faith-based activism for and against gay rights.
Both progressive and conservative faith-based activism worked by silencing the fact that the Christian faith has radically different meanings to the people who claim it as shared identity. Scholarship on religion tends to take at face value that people are who they say they are—that is, we tend to believe that someone who identifies as a Christian is one. As a result, there has been insufficient attention to the silences and erasures that perpetuate, for example, the gay/Christian binary and make it possible for Christian segregationists and Christian civil rights activists to plausibly appeal to the same religious tradition.
The point of this line of questioning is not that religion-based biases are identical.
Rather, religion functions identically to multiple and oppositional political ends.
Therefore, it argues that Christianity is what Judith Butler termed “a model of power that
[sets up] racism and homophobia and misogyny as parallel or analogical relations.”14 As chapter 1 will demonstrate, evangelical Christianity allowed the Reverend Billy Graham to issue the same call to repentance to black and white believers who gathered to hear
between black [male] bodies, labor and alienation. Rubin used two Levi-Strauss’ concepts, gift exchange and incest taboo, to explain what she termed the “exchange of women,” terms that harbor the ghosts of American slavery, particularly the exchange of blacks for profit and the specter of forced and consensual interracial sex. Gayle Rubin, “Traffic in Women: Notes on the ‘Political Economy’ of Sex,” in Toward an Anthropology of Women, ed. Rayna Reitner (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1975), 157–210. 14 Judith Butler, Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex” (New York, NY: Routledge, 1993), xxvi.
7 him preach after the 1963 bombing of 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham,
Alabama. For Graham, black anger in response to such violence was spiritually
indistinguishable from the white racist rage that justified the murderous attack. Both were
sins against the commandment to love and both required repentance. Such false
equivalencies are important for understanding how evangelical Christianity uses divine
forgiveness to silence significant differences in the histories of violence based on race,
gender, and sexuality and suggests that “what has to be thought through is the ways in
which these vectors of power require and deploy each other for the purpose of their own
articulation.”15
Faith’s Queer Pleasures uses the term “evangelical” to refer to faith-based
activism by both conservatives and progressive Christians because the twentieth-century
history of American evangelical Christianity is also a history of prejudice and resistance
thereto. In Faith’s Queer Pleasures, the term references the explicitly politicized
Christianity of the post-civil-rights era, but the politicization of American religion has a longer history. In the 1920s, white Christian fundamentalists representing multiple theologies and denominations began to publish tracts that instructed believers to privilege the Bible over scientific knowledge, protect America’s Christian heritage, and repudiate modernist theologians’ critical approach to biblical interpretation. Fundamentalists believed that the Bible was the final authority in matters of faith and practice; that belief in Jesus Christ was necessary for personal, eternal salvation; and that Christians had to share their faith through evangelism and missions. A distinct population of theologically conservative African American Christians also identified as fundamentalist Bible
15 Ibid.
8 believers and they rejected expressive black worship traditions and theological liberals
who championed modern science and tended to believe that it was more important to
evangelize black communities, that is, to promote personal salvation, than to mobilize
them to fight racial oppression.16
The term “evangelical” was later adopted by Christian conservatives who valued
political influence over theological rigidity. In 1942, the National Association of
Evangelicals (NAE) became the first Washington lobbyist group dedicated to advancing
“Christian-based moral legislation, including protecting evangelical broadcasting rights,
restrictions on liquor advertising, and limits on Catholic political influence.”17 In 1957,
NAE founding president Harold Ockenga argued that America’s social problems,
including “racial tensions which are highlighted by the problem of integration,” required
a “new evangelicalism”:
The Christians who have been evangelical, fundamentalist, orthodox, have had the highest hope that if we could get people converted, if we would get people to know Christ and if we would get their hearts right, this would carry over into every phase of society. But, unfortunately, this isn’t true. Unfortunately, we find a great many Christians who have blind spots on matters of social justice, on matters of racial tensions, on matters of social amelioration of misery of men in one form or another, and the carry-over isn’t there. . . . [New evangelicalism] means that there has evolved today a different emphasis, a different theological application of orthodox Christianity and one that is dynamic and virile and strong, one that is able to say, “Christ is the answer.” Christ is the answer when he and his teachings and Biblical Christianity become translated into the framework of the social picture in which we live.18
16 William H. Bentley, “Bible Believers in the Black Community,” in The Evangelicals: What They Believe, Who They Are, Where They Are Changing, ed. David F. Wells and John D. Woodbridge (Nashville, TN: Abingdon Press, 1975), 108–121. 17 Daniel K. Williams, God’s Own Party: The Making of the Christian Right (Oxford: Oxford University, 2010), 4; Darren Dochuk, From Bible Belt to Sun Belt: Plain-folk Religion, Grassroots Politics, and the Rise of Evangelical Conservativism (New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 2011). 18 Harold Ockenga, “The ‘New’ Evangelicalism,” in Matthew Avery Sutton, Jerry Falwell and the Rise of the Religious Right: A Brief History with Documents (Boston, MA: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2013), 31–34.
9 Although the NAE had adopted a resolution in support of African Americans having
equal opportunities in 1951, Ockenga reflected the organization’s ambivalence when he
described integration as “the problem.” That ambivalence facilitated a Christian double-
speak. Ockenga wrote that Christians had “blind spots” on matters of social justice and
racial tensions and this language allowed civil rights opponents, supporters, and those
ambivalent to the fight for racial equality to continue to externalize the solution to “racial
tensions” rather than interrogate their own bias, a tactic further explored in chapter 1
through the ministry of Reverend Billy Graham. Nevertheless, the NAE’s moral tepidity
on the issue of civil rights for black people was sufficient to offend Christian
segregationists such as Reverend Jerry Falwell and a significant number of other
Christian fundamentalists who broke with the NAE in the 1950s, a move that reflected
fundamentalists’ belief that the civil rights movement was a Communist plot to destroy
the United States. To those defecting Christians, Martin Luther King, Jr.’s faith-based
activism was a perversion of Christianity’s goal of saving souls. NAE leaders such as
Graham were more moderate but black conservative evangelicals nevertheless found it
necessary to form the National Black Evangelical Association in 1963 (originally named
the National Negro Evangelical Association) to attend to the specific needs of their
communities, which the NAE neglected. By the 1980s, Falwell had embraced the “new
evangelicalism” articulated by Ockenga, called Dr. King “a true saint,” and championed
Christian political activism to become the most famous leader of the conservative evangelical movement popularly known as the Religious Right.
Though less well-known than its conservative counterpart, LGBT Christianity is
an important example of what religion scholar Nathan O. Hatch termed the “democratic
10 or populist orientation” of the American Protestant tradition: through religion, Americans
on the margins of society articulated “a marvelous sense of individual potential and of
collective aspiration.”19 LGBT Christian Identity is, as Hatch suggests of all religious
activism, both individual and social. LGBT Christians analogized racial oppression and
homophobia in order to liberate themselves and others from socially imposed and
internalized antigay bias. Second, LGBT Christians created affirming faith communities,
as well as religious journalism and scholarship, in order to center the cultural imprimatur
of American Protestantism in the political project of gay liberation. Finally, the
intersection of evangelical politics and post-civil-rights era racial discourse provided a
framework for the righteous indignation of LGBT Christians. By reclaiming their faith,
they were empowered to condemn antigay stigma even as conservative evangelicals used
the same faith tradition to cause spiritual, physical, and political harm. Faith’s Queer
Pleasures argues that the pleasures of Christian Identity arose as much from sincere
religious conviction as from the conflation of private and American civil religion.
The Intersection of Race, Religion, and Sexuality in Christian Community
Christian communities are where many lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender
people first become conscious of the intersection of those identities and, in particular, that
some yield experiences of privilege and others experiences of oppression. Scholars have
largely excluded religion from the categories of identity that drive studies of
intersectionality, however. To be fair, legal scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw conceived the
19 Nathan O. Hatch, The Democratization of American Christianity (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989), 5.
11 term to demonstrate that laws intended to prevent discrimination based on race or gender
often failed to redress discrimination unique to black women.20 Insofar as
intersectionality advances a more just normative vision of society—by making explicit
the complexity of identity and, in particular, the simultaneity of multiple oppressions—it
is what feminist scholar Leslie McCall has termed “the most important theoretical
contribution that women’s studies, in conjunction with related fields, has made so far.”21
Even so, McCall finds that attempts to craft an intersectional methodology have 1) tended
to reinforce the very categories of identity scholars intend to problematize, 2)
demonstrated that categories themselves are inadequate because they obfuscate the
heterogeneity contained within their parameters, or 3) provisionally and strategically
accept categories of identity in order to make their relationship to power explicit. Scholar
Jennifer C. Nash observed that Crenshaw’s concept fixes black women as perfect
examples of marginalization and occludes analysis of difference within the category by
treating “black women’s race and gender [. . .] as trans-historical constants that mark all
black women in similar ways.”22 Nash’s critique of intersectionality therefore posed a
key question: whether intersectionality is primarily a general theory of identity or one
that specifically illuminates marginalization. Most important to this project, Nash argues
that Crenshaw’s formulation does not consider that categories of identity often yield
privileges and liabilities simultaneously. In order to understand the social construction of
20 Kimberlé Crenshaw, “Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics and Violence Against Women of Color,” Stanford Law Review 43, no. 6 (1991): 1241–1299; Kimberlé Crenshaw, “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics,” University of Chicago Legal Forum (1989), Article 8. Available at: https://chicagounbound.uchicago.edu/uclf/vol1989/iss1/8. 21 Leslie McCall, “The Complexity of Intersectionality,” Signs 30, no. 3 (2005): 1771. 22 Jennifer C. Nash, “Re-thinking Intersectionality,” Feminist Review 89, no. 7 (2008).
12 Christian Identity, Faith’s Queer Pleasures examines race, sexuality, and Christian identity as mutually constitutive, intersecting identities that are produced through each other and which simultaneously yield privilege and oppression.
Faith’s Queer Pleasures demonstrates that LGBT Christianity as studied here is an important example of how people engage in intersectional analyses by drawing on identities with greater social capital in order to counter the harms arising from identities that are more stigmatized. LGBT Christians were inspired to proclaim the good news of
God’s love for lesbians, gays, bisexual, and transgender people by the prominence of people of faith in the social justice movements at the end of the twentieth century.
Chapter 1, “If Jesus is the Answer, What are the Questions?” examines the historical context within which LGBT Christianity was conceived, that of the black civil rights struggle. The chapter demonstrates that attitudes and responses to antiblack racism largely depended on how evangelical Christians understood the social significance of the gospel of Jesus Christ. Evangelical Christians such as Reverend Billy Graham believed that personal salvation would remedy antiblack racism and consequent social unrest.
Evangelical Christians such as Reverend William Pannell preached a “social justice gospel”: relationship with Jesus Christ required believers to actively endeavor to ameliorate social ills such as racism. The chapter lays the foundation for understanding how evangelical Christians used their faith to understand and respond to two of the defining civil rights battles of the twentieth century, racial equity and gay rights, by beginning to answer the question of how exactly Jesus could be the answer to politically polar dilemmas.
Chapter 2, “‘We’re Not Afraid Anymore’: Reverend Troy Perry, the Universal
13 Fellowship of Metropolitan Community Churches, and the Origins of LGBT Christian
Conversion,” examines the origins of Reverend Troy Perry’s gay-affirming ministry and the faith-based activism for LGBT equality that followed. The chapter shows that early articulations of LGBT Christian activists compared homophobia to antiblack racism to make the immorality of the former culturally intelligible. Perry drew on the spiritual authority he held as a Pentecostal minister of the gospel, the example of the civil rights movement and the now iconic faith-based activism of the Reverend Martin Luther King,
Jr. to develop his vision for a gay-affirming social justice gospel model.
Chapter 3, “Race, Faith, and Sexuality in James Tinney’s Christian Identity
Politics,” examines why and how Professor James Tinney created a black, gay
Pentecostal identity. Tinney made sense of the injustice of his experience of antigay religious bias by identifying as black. Tinney used his new identity to denounce racism, sexism, and homophobia because he believed that the end of violent antiblack racism suggested the possibility of bringing about the end of homophobia.
Chapter 4, “‘The Homosexual Explosion’ in the Body of Christ: Race,
Conservative Christian Identity, and Resistance to Gay Rights,” turns attention to
Christian Identity as a powerful modifier in the broader faith-based fight against gay rights. Conservative white evangelicals and evangelicals of color rejected the idea that
LGBT people were part of the “body of Christ.” Instead, they believed that homosexuality and Christianity were irreconcilable identities and gay rights was evidence of a national moral crisis. “The body of Christ” became a metaphor of spiritual uniformity that muted racial difference in order to disambiguate opposition to gay rights and racism and to advance a “color-blind” gospel that privileged Christian Identity above
14 all other identities.
The pleasure of Christian Identity constitutes what queer theorist Jose Esteban
Muñoz termed disidentification—a process by which an individual neither assimilates nor resists dominant ideology but “tries to transform cultural logic from within, always laboring to enact permanent structural change while at the same time value the importance of local or everyday struggles of resistance.”23 Muñoz coined
“disidentification” to describe the experience of creating a new identity from the often
marginalizing way one is read within dominant culture. The new identity creates
opportunities to imagine oneself as more than marginalized but also entails a certain
melancholia, which arises from a sense of loss or injury. For Muñoz, the work of Latino
performance artist Carmelita Tropicana and Asian filmmaker Richard Fung reveal “the
mediations that attempt to render hybridity invisible and unthinkable.”24 Likewise, Isaac
Julien, a black gay filmmaker, creates filmic representations that juxtapose melancholia
and ecstasy. In each category of art, dominant, hegemonic discourses are “put to work” in
projects that portray the performative resolution of “ideological contradictory
elements.”25 Muñoz further explains “disidentificatory pleasure” by examining how pleasure and political sensibility collide when Julien and other gay men of color experience viewed the “black male objectification” portrayed in the art of Robert
Mapplethorpe. Muñoz’s theory provides a frame for understanding how LGBT Christians
reimagined Christian identity by rejecting homophobic interpretations of scripture,
23 Jose Muñoz. Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 1999), 11–12. 24 Ibid., 79. 25 For example, Latino performance artist Carmelita Tropicana and Asian filmmaker Richard Fung are each invested in projects of disidentification, in that their work “mak[es] visible [. . .] the mediations that attempt to render hybridity invisible and unthinkable” (79). Muñoz, Disidentifications, 12.
15 building new faith communities and countering religious homophobia through their own faith-based social activism.
The kind of Christianity that dominated late twentieth-century American religious discourse was theologically conservative, evangelical in practice, and deeply committed to the narrative that the nuclear family is the only hope for America’s future. In the words of conservative evangelical icon Reverend Jerry Falwell, God ordained only three institutions “in the Bible: government, the church and the [nuclear] family.”26 Calling for a return to godly principles, Falwell said “‘homosexual’ was a word that represented the zenith of human indecency” even as he claimed “I love homosexuals as souls for whom
Christ died [. . .] but I must hate their sin.”27 The “family” in Falwell’s call for a return to
“Family Values,” therefore, was led by a dominant man and his submissive wife who, in turn, had authority through him over their obedient children. Indeed, Falwell and other leaders and of the Religious Right led laity to understand themselves as “evangelists” of conservative social politics such that the nuclear family became a microcosm of God’s will for the United States. In this way, every conservative evangelical could fulfill their responsibility to evangelize, to proclaim the gospel, or good news, of their beliefs to others if their families simply attended church every week and socialized with other believers who were equally committed to faith, family, and conservative social values.
Within this brand of evangelicalism, homosexual sex and homosexual identity were affronts to God, family, and country.
The Christians studied here emerged from such conservative religious beliefs to
26 Jerry Falwell. 1980. Listen America! (Garden City, NY: Doubleday and Company, Inc., 1980), 121. 27 Ibid.,181, 186.
16 claim their sexual identity at the same time that they refused to relinquish their faith. Like
that of Reverend Ken South, their decisions to remain in the Christian church were acts of
defiance. The reclamation of Christian Identity among such gays and lesbians is the very
definition of what it means to disidentify: to look “at an image that has been constructed
to exploit and deny identity and to find pleasure, both erotic and self-affirming” instead
of despair.28 While Muñoz’s use of “erotic” here includes the possibility of sexual desire,
it is not limited to it. Indeed, his project is generative for its attention to the range of
pleasures that arise from queer performance. In that way, it builds on Audre Lorde’s
definition of the erotic as “not only a question of what we do [but also] how acutely and
fully we can feel in the doing [because] we can then observe which of our various life
endeavors bring us closest to that fullness.”29 In this project the erotic includes the
performance of faith as one of many extra-sexual modes of pleasure—one readily
claimed by opponents and supporter of LGBT equality.
By analyzing materials gathered from archival research at Howard University
Library’s Moorland Spingarn Research Center, Cornell University Library’s Human
Sexuality Collection, interviews, writing by and about LGBT Christians, and sermons
and church literature, each chapter demonstrates that LGBT Christianity was a crucial
site for the articulation of a gay and lesbian political equality.30 Moreover, the pleasures
of Christian Identity inspired social critique and social action. The radical uprising of the
28 Muñoz, Disidentifications, 72. 29 Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches by Audre Lorde (Berkeley, CA: The Crossing Press, 1984), 54–55. 30 Robert Goss, Queering Christ: Beyond Jesus Acted Up (Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock Publishers, 2007), 239–258; Nancy Wilson, Outing the Church: 40 Years in the LGBT Christian Movement (Indianapolis, IN: Life Journey Press, 2013); Deborah Jian Lee, Rescuing Jesus: How People of Color, Women, and LGBT Christians are Reclaiming Evangelicalism (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 2015).
17 1969 Stonewall Rebellion is widely recognized as the defining act of the modern movement for gay rights. Yet, for people of faith an equally important moment occurred a year earlier in October of 1968. Twelve gays and lesbians gathered for Christian worship in the home of Reverend Troy Perry, a defrocked Pentecostal minister. As did those people of faith who led the preceding peace and civil rights movements as well as the Religious Right movement that followed, lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender
Christians used religious belief as a tool by which to become part of America’s history of faith-based social and political activism. In so doing, they provide evidence of religion scholar Robert Orsi’s argument that religion “cannot be neatly separated from the other practices of everyday life [nor] separated from the material circumstances in which specific instances of religious imagination and behavior arise and to which they respond.”31 While many consider the gay rights movement the successor of the African
American civil rights movement there has been insufficient attention to the religious and spiritual lives of gays and lesbians in existing scholarship. In the section that follows, I review scholarship that informs Faith’s Queer Pleasures.
Identity and Christianity
Throughout the project, LGBT Christian Identity refers to the profession and performance of evangelical Christian belief for the purpose of shifting dominant,
31 Robert Orsi, “Everyday Miracles: The Study of Lived Religion,” in Lived Religion in America: Toward a History of Practice, ed. David D. Hall (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997), 3–21: 7; Timothy Fitzgerald similarly argues that we are best equipped to understand how religious belief and practice when we consider so-called nonreligious aspects of culture, because they are part of “symbolic system.” Timothy Fitzgerald, “A Critique of ‘Religion’ as a Cross-Cultural Category,” Method and Theory in the Study of Religion 9, no. 2 (1997): 92.
18 heteronormative religious discourse.32 Importantly, studies of identity, identity politics,
and intersectionality give little attention to religion, much less LGBT Christianity.
Although originally a legal term coined by scholar Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw to
account for injuries that the law does not recognize—namely the intersection of race and
gender—intersectionality has arguably become the most well-known concept in feminist theory. Although Crenshaw’s formulation of the concept does not equip us to understand the contingency and contextuality of identity, it remains useful, as Cathy Cohen once noted, “for those of us who find ourselves on the margins, operating through multiple identities and thus not fully served or recognized through traditional single-identity-based politics.”33 Further, the believers chronicled in this project indicate that, among their most salient identities, Americans use their faith to respond to the times in which they
live and to ground utopian visions for the future. LGBT Christians also highlight
important connections between lived religion and civil religion.
While Christian identity and American identity are not synonymous, the two have
often been conflated. Robert Bellah’s 1967 essay, “Civil Religion in America,” was
important because at the time it was widely believed that Christianity was the national
faith of the United States and that faith communities were the site of its practice.34 Bellah
32 While the dissertation does not examine queer Jews, Muslims, and practitioners of non-Abrahamic traditions, scholars have produced exciting work on gender and sexuality in these traditions. Amanullah De Sondy, The Crisis of Islamic Masculinities (London, England: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2013); Christine Hoff Kraemer, “Gender and Sexuality in Contemporary Paganism,” Religion Compass 6, no. 8 (August 2012): 390–401; Daniel Boyarin, Daniel Itzkovitz, and Ann Pellegrini, eds. Queer Theory and the Jewish Question (New York: Columbia University, 2003). 33 Cathy J. Cohen, “Punks, Bulldaggers, and Welfare Queens: The Radical Potential of Queer Politics?” in Black Queer Studies: A Critical Anthology, ed. E. Patrick Johnson and Mae G. Henderson, 21-51 (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2005). 34 Catherine Albanese’s work has established that American religion has always been more diverse than the Christian centricity of most scholarship suggests. See especially, A Republic of Mind and Spirit: A Cultural History of American Metaphysical Religion (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007) .
19 imagined civil religion as a separate sphere from personal faith, stating, “Although
matters of personal religious belief, worship, and association are considered to be strictly
private affairs, there are, at the same time, certain common elements of religious
orientation that the great majority of Americans share. These have played a crucial role in
the development of American institutions and still provide a religious dimension for the
whole fabric of American life, including the political sphere.”35 To Bellah, citizens read
universal truths and values in rhetoric about the state and these truths and values are
consonant with their personal faith. The LGBT Christian movement studied here suggests
that Americans apprehend civil religion through the tenets of their own faith traditions
and thus conflate the ideals of faith and the state such that gay and lesbian as well as
antigay Christians believe that God favors their political position.
The tendency of Christians to explicitly organize around political issues is a fairly
recent phenomenon detailed in Robert Wuthnow’s Restructuring of American Religion.
After the 1950s, Wuthnow argued, Americans began to eschew denominationalism in
favor of special interest groups fueled by cultural understandings of what it means to be
religious.36 First, political activism constituted a new brand of evangelism during this period as believers united across doctrine to take positions on the most pressing issues of the day, including gay rights, civil rights, and abortion. Second, American civil religion recuperates resistance to systemic and institutional inequality through this conflation.
Third, insofar as private religion comports with the Abrahamic faith traditions that have
35 Robert N. Bellah, “Civil Religion in America,” Dædalus, Journal of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, from the issue entitled, “Religion in America,” 96, no. 1 (Winter 1967), pp. 1–21. 36 Robert Wuthnow, The Restructuring of American Religion: Society and Faith Since World War II (Princeton: Princeton University, 1988).
20 predominated since the nation’s founding, the conflation of private and civil religion
facilitates the participation of minorities in the public sphere by providing a platform for
the proliferation of overtly politicized Christian identities—liberal and conservative,
heteronormative and queer, both racialized and those presumed universal. Indeed, this is
the pleasure of American Christian identity: that the particularities of race, gender, and
sexual identity are reinterpreted as expressions of Divine creativity, such that injuries that
emerge from the stigmatization of those identities come to reflect not the moral defect of
the injured but that of the injurer. In that way, Christian Identity converts what was a site
of injury into evidence of divine love and affirmation. It provides rhetoric of rectitude
and justice that mirrors the ideals of the State, which fuel the activism of LGBT
Christians as much as their conservative counterparts.37 In the words of Michael Warner,
“religion makes available a language of ecstasy, a horizon of significance within which
transgressions against the normal order of the world and the boundaries of the self can be
seen as good things.38 The following section reviews scholarship on LGBT Christian
Identity.
Recent Scholarship on Sexuality and Christianity
Early scholarship on LGBT Christians relied heavily on ethnographic methods
and primarily worked to explain their ongoing attachment to what most often appear to be
an aggressively antigay faith tradition. Sociologists Ronald Enroth and Gerald Jamison
37 Chapter 2 will examine the way conservative evangelicals understood these terms. One significant difference is that equality in the rhetoric of the Religious Right referred to equality in the eyes of God, such that all are sinners who have equal access to redemption through Jesus Christ. This version of equality often ignored systems of social inequality. 38 Michael Warner, “Tongues Untied: Memoirs of a Pentecostal Boyhood,” in Que(e)rying Religion: A Critical Anthology, ed. Gary Comstock and Susan Henking (New York: Continuum, 2004).
21 appear to have been the first scholars to study gay and lesbian Christians. Their text, The
Gay Church (1974) focused on Metropolitan Community Churches but did not offer an
academic argument as much as satisfy the authors’ anxiety over the cultural incongruity
of homosexual and Christian identities. Enroth and Jamison concluded that classic
fundamentalism—belief in the inerrancy of the Bible—was the foundation of gay
theology underpinning the gay church, despite its largely homosexual leadership and
laity.39 As a result, they predicted that more liberal gays would create a new church that would compete with the theologically conservative MCC. Despite what they perceived as
MCC’s theological conservatism, Enroth and Jamison charged gay churches with engaging in faulty biblical exegesis and predicted that they would therefore never develop working relationships with many nongay churches. Importantly, Enroth and
Jamison recognized that the overwhelmingly male leadership of MCC from 1969–1973 would lead to charges of sexism.40 Indeed, by the time The Gay Church was published,
Reverend Freda Smith, the first woman voted to the Board of Elders and the first woman
ordained by MCC had led a line-by-line change of the Fellowship’s bylaws at the Fourth
General Convention in Atlanta, Georgia, to include gender-neutral language.41 Even so,
since Troy Perry published The Lord Is my Shepherd and He Knows I’m Gay in 1972
male voices have dominated the small body of literature of LGBT conversion narratives.
In each, LGBT Christians detail the processes by which individuals integrate their sexual
orientation and identity with the conservative religious traditions from which they came.
39 Ronald M. Enroth and Gerald E. Jamison, The Gay Church (Grand Rapids: Wiliam B. Eerdmans Publishing, 1974): 93–94. 40 Ibid., 132–133. 41 Explored further in chapter 1. Troy Perry and Thomas Swicegood, Don’t Be Afraid Anymore: The Story of Reverend Troy Perry and the Metropolitan Community Churches (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1990), 112–119.
22 None of the narratives to date have been written by LGBT people who converted to
Christianity after coming out.
Scholars that followed were less interested in challenging MCC’s biblical
exegesis and more focused on the intersection of sexual and religious identities. In
Coming Out in Christianity: Religion, Identity and Community, Melissa M. Wilcox
(2003) observed that Christian gays and lesbians often felt compelled to choose between
affirming their gay or Christian identities, and that many believed it impossible to
reconcile them. Wilcox’s study of two congregations within the Universal Fellowship of
Metropolitan Community Churches was less interested in establishing the legitimacy of
the faith of LGBT Christians than in rejecting the notion that religious belief was
evidence of self-loathing. Sociologist Scott Thumma studied the “complex and subtle
process of identity negotiation” undertaken by gay men who reconstructed their
evangelical identity through fellowship with other gay conservative evangelicals.
Thumma found in a subsequent study that patrons celebrated the intersection of their
sexual and religious identities by sharing Christian music in a gay bar during a weekly
“Gospel Hour.”42 Michelle Wolkomir’s Be Not Deceived: The Sacred and Sexual
Struggles of Gay and Ex-Gay Christian Men (2006) studied prayer groups of gays and
ex-gays who had come from conservative Christian churches. Wolkomir’s most
important contribution is demonstrating that the groups used similar core beliefs: “that
the Bible is the true Word of God, that God’s plan for each person’s life can be
42 Scott Thumma, “Negotiating a Christian Identity: The Case of the Gay Evangelical,” Sociological Analysis 52, no. 4: Religious Movements and Social Movements (Winter 1991): 333–47, http://www.jstor.org/stable/3710850. Edward R. Gray and Scott L. Thumma, “The Gospel Hour: Liminality, Identity, and Religion in a Gay Bar,” in Contemporary American Religion: An Ethnographic Reader, ed. Penny Edgell Becker and Nancy L. Eiesland (Walnut Creek: AltaMira Press, 1997), 79–98; Scott Thumma and Edward R. Gray, Gay Religion (Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira Press, 2005).
23 discovered through prayer, that God sacrificed Jesus to save the world, and that God
loves all people and will work positively in their lives if they allow it.”43 Interestingly,
both groups focused on the context to which biblical passages about homosexuality are
interpreted. The gay Christians knew that biblical justifications for slavery were no
longer taken literally and many rejected the Apostle Paul’s call for the subjugation of
women. This caused them to understand that the meaning of words change over time,
which suggested that passages about homosexuality could also have changed. Therefore,
they noted the historical context in which the Bible was written and the different versions
of the text, particularly differences between the King James Version and the New
International Version. Ex-gay Christians engaged in a similar interpretive strategy.
Instead of interrogating the Bible itself, they argued that human bias had overemphasized
the sinfulness of homosexuality. Instead, Christians who experienced same-sex desire or homosexual identity were no more sinful than any other Christian implicated in Paul’s letter to the church at Corinth.44 The ex-gays believed that ending the stigma attached to homosexuality was the first step toward being healed from it.
Tanya Erzen’s Straight to Jesus: Sexual and Christian Conversions in the Ex-Gay
Movement (2006) is an ethnographic study of Love Won Out, the first ex-gay ministry.
Erzen’s project detailed the struggles of Christians who were compelled by their faith to renounce same-sex behavior. It also exposed the endless struggle for spiritual deliverance from same-sex desire that challenges the claims of reparative therapy. In Pray the Gay
43 Michelle Wolkomir, Be Not Deceived: The Sacred and Sexual Struggles of Gay and Ex-Gay Christian Men (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University, 2006), xiii. 44 “Know ye not that the unrighteous shall not inherit the kingdom of God? Be not deceived: neither fornicators, nor idolaters, nor adulterers, nor effeminate, nor abusers of themselves with mankind, Nor thieves, nor covetous, nor drunkards, nor revilers, nor extortioners, shall inherit the kingdom of God.” I Corinthians 6 9-10, KJV.
24 Away: The Extraordinary Lives of Bible Belt Gays (2012), sociologist Bernadette Barton
used ethnographic fieldwork and in-depth interviews to provide a window into the lives
of “Bible Belt gays” and their experiences of quotidian and extreme homophobia. Barton
argued that “Bible Belt Christian attitudes create and maintain a homophobic status quo”
that permeates southern customs through the social power wielded by Christian
institutions and Christians within secular institutions.45 More recently, important
scholarship by Heather White (2015) historicized “the idea that religion was the taproot
source for antigay prejudice” by showing that such prejudice is an invention of the
twentieth century.46 White’s project helps to shift discussion of faith and sexuality away
from analysis of passages of scriptures and toward analysis of ways that “Bible
translators and gay activists to Christian traditionalists and secular judiciaries” helped
create the narrative of scriptural origins of antigay bias. In so doing, White invites study
of other narratives that might be found with greater attention to the historical and cultural
context of religious meaning-making.
These texts demonstrate that LGBT people have used their faith to make sense of
antigay stigma. They also analyze the means by which the intersection of personal faith
and social identity equipped LGBT Christians to re-imagine religious and national belonging. Because most scholarship on late twentieth-century American Christianity has focused on conservative evangelicals, in particular their political world-making, the following section examines traditional views of Christianity, and how those views
45 Bernadette Barton, Pray the Gay Away: The Extraordinary Lives of Bible Belt Gays (New York: New York University, 2012), 4. 46 Heather R. White, Reforming Sodom: Protestants and the Rise of Gay Rights (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina, 2015), 3–6.
25 occlude the history of LGBT Christianity.
Evangelical Christianity, Sexuality, and Social Reform
In studies of evangelical Christianity, individuals such as Reverend Perry and
Reverend Mel White, former ghost-writer for and friend of Reverend Jerry Falwell, are
outliers. They and other LGBT Christians are curious anomalies in accounts of the larger
and largely irreligious equality movement for lesbian and gay rights, and they are
therefore largely absent from studies of evangelical Christianity and activism at the end
of the twentieth century.47 John D’Emilio’s emphasis on religious homophobia caused
him to miss the sexual heterogeneity that exists within conservative Christianity. As
D’Emilio (1983) explained, much homophobia stems from “the Judeo-Christian tradition
[in which] homosexual behavior was excoriated as a heinous sin, the law branded it as a
serious crime, and the medical profession diagnosed homosexuals and lesbians as
diseased.”48 D’Emilio also noted the impact of “[b]iblical condemnations of homosexual
behavior” and noted that, according to the research of Alfred Kinsey, religious belief
continued to exert the greatest influence on sexual behavior in the United States. Not
surprisingly, queer irreligion has been a way to claim intellectual and cultural superiority
over backwardness attributed to religious perpetrators of anti-homosexual animus. As
Michael Warner said succinctly, “To be secular is to be modern. To be more secular is to
47 In this way, lesbian and gay Christians invite study of queer political challenges to conservative evangelical Christianity. Cathy J. Cohen identifies queer politics “as a fundamental challenge to the heteronormativity—the privilege, power and normative status invested in heterosexuality—of the dominant society.” Cohen, “Punks, Bulldaggers, and Welfare Queens,” 21-51. 48 John D’Emilio, Sexual Politics, Sexual Communities: The Making of a Homosexual Minority in the United States, 1940-1970 (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago, 1983), 13.
26 be more modern.”49
Scholars have mostly written gay and lesbian history as a secular narrative in which Christianity is a source of oppression. According to secularization theories of religion, societies reject religious institutions and values as they undergo modernization;
secular institutions and values assume the social and moral authority religious
organizations once held. The creation of LGBT Christian congregations and parachurch
organizations is therefore more reflective of disestablishment theories of religion. Such
theories argue that religious institutions have changed, not disappeared: no longer
restricted to great cathedrals or longstanding denominations, faith communities also exist
independent of dominant groups. Despite ongoing debates about modernity and religion,
the reclamation of Christianity by gays and lesbians is a critique of the secularity of the
mainstream gay liberation movement and the homophobia of conservative churches. Gay
clergy as well as caucuses within traditional denominations have grown since the late
1960s.
In addition to Perry’s Universal Fellowship of Metropolitan Community Churches
(UFMCC), Dignity, a national gay-affirming Roman Catholic organization established in
1969, met in churches and on campuses. Reverend Declan Daly, a priest at the
Washington, DC, chapter of Dignity meeting at George Washington University’s
Newman Center, summarized the issue by saying, “The church is faced with the fact that
49 Warner, “Tongues Untied,” 231. Some scholars argue for a “neosecularization” theory of religion, in which religion persists by being in a constant state of transformation. Although a general theory of religion is not the goal of this project, faith-based social movements such as the LGBT Christian movement are in many ways powerful examples of the adaptive capacities of religion. See, for example, Andrew K.T. Yip, “The Persistence of Faith among Nonheterosexual Christians: Evidence for the Neosecularization Thesis of Religious Transformation,” Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 41, no. 2 (2002): 199–212.
27 gay people are in it from the bishop on down, whether they practice sex or not.”50
Reverend James Glyer, a father of six, who divorced his wife in 1971 and came out in
1973, left the Presbyterian Church in which he had been a minister for twenty-five years to join UFMCC.51 In 1969, the Unitarian Universalist Association established the Office
for Gay and Lesbian Concerns—the first of its kind—and Unitarian ministers
increasingly demanded recognition of their sexual identities.52 The governing board of
the National Council of Churches, which had been prominent in the African American
civil rights struggle of the 1960s responded to the clamor over gay rights by urging its
constituents to work for civil rights for homosexuals. Although bishops in the United
Methodist Church declared homosexuality incompatible with Christian teaching, gay
Methodists established Affirmation, a name shared by the caucus of gay Mormons.
Liberal Christian denominations such as Unitarians and United Church of Christ (UCC)
became more open in their support of gays and lesbians, though not without
consequence.53 In January 1975, First Congregational UCC leased space to Metropolitan
Community Church of the District of Columbia (MCC-DC) and lost members who would
not “endorse that lifestyle.”
The focus on the perpetrators of religious homophobia has relegated figures such
as Reverend Glyer to the margins of scholarship on faith-based social reform movements.
Therefore, the dissertation responds to the question of why Christians who have been hurt
50 Janis Johnson, “Catholic Homosexuals Pressing for Rethinking of Taboo,” Washington Post, May 20, 1975, C3. 51 Glyer was serving as an MCC minister at time of the article. Michael Bauer, “Minister to City’s Homosexuals,” The Kansas City Star, Sunday, January 30, 1977, no page. Tinney Papers. 52 Mark Oppenheimer, Knocking on Heaven’s Door: American Religion in the Age of Counterculture (New Haven, CT: Yale University, 2003); also, All Souls Church Archives, Unitarian Universalist Association, Washington, DC. 53 Johnson, “Catholic Homosexuals Pressing for Rethinking of Taboo,” C3.
28 by religious homophobia remain committed to their faith traditions. It builds on scholarship that demonstrates the persistence of religious belief and the processes by which LGBT Christians from conservative traditions achieve reconciliation.54 It provides insight on a population of Christians who resisted “ex-gay conversion” and other strategies to overcome same-sex attraction.55
54 Scholars have studied the faith of LGBT Christians in order to understand the reconciliation of sexual and religious identities and the reasons Christianity remains important to them. Karma R. Chávez, “Beyond Complicity: Coherence, Queer Theory, and the Rhetoric of the ‘Gay Christian Movement,’” Text and Performance Quarterly 24, no. 3 (2004): 255–75; Peter E. Coleman, Gay Christians: A Moral Dilemma (Philadelphia: SCM Press, 1990); Enroth and Jamison, The Gay Church; Kirk A. Foster, Sharon E. Bowland, and Anne Nancy Vosler, “All the Pain Along with All the Joy: Spiritual Resilience in Lesbian and Gay Christians,” American Journal of Community Psychology 55, no. 1 (2015): 191-201; Tim Kroenert, “Gay Christians' Church Trauma,” Eureka Street, 22, no. 7 (2012); Justin Lee, Torn: Rescuing the Gospel from the Gays-vs.-Christians Debate, 1st ed. (New York: Jericho Books, 2012); Rowland Macaulay, “‘Just as I Am, Without One Plea’: A Journey to Reconcile Sexuality and Spirituality,” Ethnicity and Inequalities in Health and Social Care 3, no. 3 (2010): 6–13; John McNeill, “Embracing the Exile: Healing Journeys of Gay Christians,” National Catholic Reporter 29 (1993); Richard N. Pitt, “‘Still Looking for my Jonathan’: Gay Black Men's Management of Religious and Sexual Identity Conflicts.” Journal of Homosexuality 57, no. 1 (2009): 39–53; Eric M. Rodriguez, “At the Intersection of Church and Gay: A Review of the Psychological Research on Gay and Lesbian Christians,” Journal of Homosexuality 57, 1 (2010): 5-38; Eric M. Rodriguez, and Suzanne C. Ouellette, “Gay and Lesbian Christians: Homosexual and Christian Identity Integration in the Members and Participants of a Gay‐ Positive Church,” Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 39, no. 3 (2000): 333–347; Christopher H. Rosik, Lois K. Griffith, and Zenaida Cruz, Homophobia and Conservative Religion: Toward a More Nuanced Understanding,” American Journal of Orthopsychiatry 77, no. 1 (January 2007): 10–9; Letha Scanzoni, and Virginia R. Mollenkott. Is the Homosexual my Neighbor?: A Positive Christian Response (rev. and updated). (San Francisco, CA: Harper SanFrancisco, 1994); Scott, “Negotiating a Christian Identity”; Thumma and Gray, Gay Religion; Gerald Walton, “‘Fag church’: Men who Integrate Gay and Christian Identities,” Journal of Homosexuality 51, no. 2 (2006): 1–17. 55 Scholarly attention has also been given to people who do not want to be gay or lesbian use their faith to “become heterosexual”: Michelle A. Abate, “‘Learning How to Be the Boy or Girl You Are’: Me Tarzan, You Jane, the Crusade to ‘Cure’ Prehomosexual Children, and the New Face of the Ex-gay Movement in the United States,” Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth 7, no. 3 (2014): 534 -555, 568; Elizabeth Arthur, Dillon McGill, and Elizabeth H. Essary, “Playing it Straight: Framing Strategies among Reparative Therapists,” Sociological Inquiry 84, no. 1 (2014): 16–41; Tina Fetner, “Ex-gay Rhetoric and the Politics of Sexuality: The Christian Antigay/Pro-family Movement’s ‘Truth in Love’ Ad Campaign,” Journal of Homosexuality 50, no. 1 (2005): 71; Annesa Flentje, Nicholas C. Heck, and Bryan N. Cochran, Experiences of Ex-ex-gay Individuals in Sexual Reorientation Therapy: Reasons for Seeking Treatment, Perceived Helpfulness and Harmfulness of Treatment, and Post-treatment Identification,” Journal of Homosexuality 61, no. 9 (2014): 1242–68; Lynne Gerber, “Grit, Guts, and Vanilla Beans: Godly Masculinity in the Ex-gay Movement,” Gender & Society 29, no. 1 (2015): 26–50; Lynne Gerber, “The Opposite of Gay: Nature, Creation, and Queerish Ex-gay Experiments,” Nova Religio: The Journal of Alternative and Emergent Religions 11, no 4 (2008): 8–30; André P. Grace, “The Charisma and Deception of Reparative Therapies: When Medical Science Beds Religion,” Journal of Homosexuality 55, no. 4 (2008): 545–80; Lon B. Johnston, and David Jenkins, “Lesbians and Gay Men Embrace their Sexual Orientation after Conversion Therapy and Ex-gay Ministries: A Qualitative Study,” Social Work in Mental
29 Although churches have historically fulfilled the “Great Commission” through
domestic and international evangelistic missions to convert nonbelievers to belief in Jesus
Christ, Faith’s Queer Pleasures shows why the LGBT Christians who emerged at the end
of the twentieth century were largely invested in changing the hearts and minds of those
who already believed. Gay and lesbian Christians believed that their increased, vocal
visibility would confound faith-based homophobia. In this way, they call attention to the
multiplicity of conversions that evangelical Christianity makes possible. As Susan Friend
Harding wrote, “God called on some Protestants to abolish slavery, others to preserve it.
In [the twentieth century] he counseled and nourished Protestants on both sides of the
struggle over civil rights and racial inequality. . . . God called some Protestants to work
on behalf of the very reforms—abortion rights, gay rights, gender equality—that
fundamentalists considered signs and agents of contemporary moral declension.”56
The use of the same Christian identity for conflicting political agendas confounds
dominant but facile constructions in which Christians and gays and lesbians are discrete
identities. Christians draw from the same well of religious rhetoric and experience many
of the same pleasures of Christian Identity. Using shared tropes of exile and divine favor,
lesbians and gays from conservative churches survived the violence of coming out in
heterosexist religious organizations. The “calling” that Harding considers above suggests
that proclaiming Christian identity gave them social power to reduce stigma in one area,
Health 4, no. 3 (2006): 61–82; Warren Throckmorton, “Initial Empirical and Clinical Findings Concerning the Change Process for Ex-gays,” Professional Psychology: Research and Practice 33, no. 3 (2002): 242– 8. 56 Susan Friend Harding, The Book of Jerry Falwell: Fundamentalist Language and Politics (Princeton: Princeton University, 2000), 11.
30 namely queer identity, by accentuating affinity with the larger population of Christians.57
Emphasizing Christian Identity helped to de-emphasize the sense of otherness caused by
religious homophobia.58 As Reverend Larry Uhrig, pastor of Metropolitan Community
Church of Washington, DC, noted: “We have been escorted out of the religious communities we were once a part of precisely because our very presence threatened to undo the traditional structures which had conveniently held sexuality and spirituality apart from one another. To allow gay people to stay in the religious structures inevitably
[requires dialogue about] sexuality and spirituality. [. . .] The result [of accepting their relatedness will bring] reformation and restoration of a decayed and corrupt Western religious tradition which awaits the voice of new prophets.”59 LGBT Christians
understood themselves as fulfilling God’s will. Their prophetic faith is an important
example of how faith informs Christian Identity and social action. As such, Faith’s Queer
Pleasures places LGBT faith-based in conversation with the most influential faith
movements of the late twentieth century: the 1960s civil rights movement and the
conservative Christian evangelical movement popularly known as the Religious Right.
While the cultures of black churches vary widely by denomination, theology, and
57 In the words of religion scholar Robert Orsi: “Power is fundamental to the very meaning [. . .] of religious practices in particular, not only the power of some over others, but also the power that circulates through as it sustains and vivifies cultural aesthetics [. . .] and it is pointless to study religion without reference to power (to both kinds of power), pointless and irresponsible.” Robert A. Orsi, “Is the Study of Lived Religion Irrelevant to the World We Live in? Special Presidential Plenary Address, Society for the Scientific Study of Religion, Salt Lake City, November 2, 2002,” Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 42, no. 2 (June 2003); 169-174: 172. 58This kind of participation in the public sphere is called covering, which Political Scientist Mignon Moore defines as “the process of making efforts to prevent a stigmatized or disfavored identity from looming large in order to reduce tension and deflect attention from the stigma.” Mignon Moore, “Articulating a Politics of (Multiple) Identities: LGBT Sexuality and Inclusion in Black Community Life,” Du Bois Review: Social Science Research on Race (2010): 315–334. 59 Larry J. Uhrig. “Sexuality and the Spirit: An Inseparable Union,” Washington Blade, January 16, 1984: 23.
31 level of political activism, black church members generally used the institutions for education, community-building, and organizing as well as worship.60 David Chappell’s A
Stone of Hope: Prophetic Religion and the Death of Jim Crow argued that prophetic
Christianity equipped black Southern Christians to read racial injustice as an evil that
God would ultimately defeat. Reverend Fred Shuttlesworth declared to a crowd in 1958:
“This [civil rights] is a religious crusade, a fight between light and darkness, right and wrong, good and evil, fair play and tyranny. We are assured of victory because we are using weapons of spiritual warfare.”61 Therefore, people interpreted their actions as part of a divine move of God when they risked losing their livelihoods and their lives to state- sanctioned violence. For many God was working through them. Studies of civil rights era faith-based organizing demonstrate that many Christians assigned spiritual meaning to their acts of resistance, across differences of race and class. James F. Findlay, Jr’s Church
People in the Struggle chronicled the National Council of Churches’ shift from
60 Studies of African American religion Christianity: Estrelda Y. Alexander, Black Fire: One Hundred Years of African American Pentecostalism (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2011); Anthea D. Butler, Women in the Church of God in Christ: Making a Sanctified World (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2007); Curtis J. Evans, The Burden of Black Religion (New York, Oxford University Press, 2008); Marla Frederick, Between Sundays: Black Women and Everyday Struggles of Faith, Gender and Sexuality in American Religion (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2003); Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Righteous Discontent: The Women's Movement in the Black Baptist Church, 1880-1920 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994); William E. Montgomery, Under Their Own Vine and Fig Tree: The African-American Church in the South, 1865-1900 (Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State University Press, 1993); Bettye Collier Thomas, Jesus, Jobs, and Justice: African American Women and Religion (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2010); Jonathan L. Walton, Watch This!: The Ethics and Aesthetics of Black Televangelism. Studies of Religion in the Civil Rights Movement (New York: NYU Press, 2009); David Chappell, A Stone of Hope: Prophetic Religion and the Death of Jim Crow (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2007); James F. Findlay, Jr., Church People in the Struggle: The National Council of Churches and the Black Freedom Movement, 1950-1970 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993); Frederick C. Harris, Something Within: Religion in African-American Political Activism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001); Joseph Kip Kosek, Acts of Conscience: Christian Nonviolence and Modern American Democracy (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009); Barbara Dianne Savage, Your Spirits Walk beside Us: The Politics of Black Religion (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2012). 61 Quoted in Chappell, A Stone of Hope, 88.
32 contentment with “gradual change and modest tokens of progress in racial justice” to a new level of support for civil rights activists who were “moving quickly and with great commitment to action that often means suffering, harassment and sometimes death.”62
Findlay argued that the predominantly white and middle-class NCC had moved into a kairos moment, a concept useful for understanding faith-based social activism.
Contrasted with chronos, or the quotidian rhythm of everyday life, kairos, is a special kind of time in which God, working through humankind, is believed to do extraordinary things.63 In social movements, then, to identify with Christianity is to place the evangelical individual in kairos.
Several scholars of late twentieth-century American religious culture have shown that conservative evangelicals and fundamentalists64 also imagined themselves participating in a kairos moment.65 Joel Carpenter’s Revive Us Again: The Reawakening
62 Findlay, Church People in the Struggle, 3. 63 James Findlay, Jr. uses the example in Mark 1:15 when Jesus begins his ministry to illustrate this special kind of time: “The time (kairos) is now fulfilled and the Kingdom of God is at hand. Repent and believe the gospel.” Findlay, Church People in the Struggle, 4. 64 Since the Religious Right began its rise in the late 1970s, conservative Christians are generally labeled “evangelical” no matter their actual denominational affiliation. Mainline Protestants have a more modern theology, generally do not emphasize conversion experiences and are more likely to regard scripture as a historical document. Evangelicals refers typically require the following: conversion, or a personal relationship/experience with Jesus Christ, belief in the authority of the Bible and in its accessibility to all believers through their relationship with Christ and, lastly, commitment to evangelizing, or actively sharing faith experiences to facilitate the conversion of others to belief in and relationship with Jesus Christ. Fundamentalists are most conservative. They believe in the inerrancy of the Bible, interpret it as literal truth and assert it as the guide against which all belief and behavior should be judged. 65 Studies of evangelical Christianity: Ammerman, Nancy T. Ammerman, Bible Believers: Fundamentalists in the Modern World (New Brunswick, J: Rutgers University Press, 1987); Joel A. Carpenter, Revive Us Again: The Reawakening of American Fundamentalism (New York; Oxford University Press, 1997); Findlay, Church People in the Struggle; R. Marie Griffith, God’s Daughters: Evangelical Women and the Power of Submission (Berkeley, CA: University of California, 1997); Tona J. Hangen, Redeeming the Dial: Radio, Religion, and Popular Culture in America (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2002); Christine Leigh Heyrman, Southern Cross: The Beginnings of the Bible Belt (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina, 1997); Wade Clark Roof, Spiritual Marketplace: Baby Boomers and the Remaking of American Religion (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press: 2001); Jon A. Shields, The Democratic Virtues of the Christian Right (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009); Christian Smith and Michael Emerson, Divided by Faith: Evangelical Religion and the Problem of Race in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001); John G. Turner, Bill
33 of American Fundamentalism (1997) chronicled the recrudescence of American
fundamentalism after the tradition’s embarrassing defeat in the 1925 Scopes Trial.
Entrepreneurial ministries used mass revivals, missionaries, and radio technology to
create a less rigid, though equally conservative, evangelical Christian movement with
leaders who had mainstream appeal such as the Reverend Billy Graham.66 Carpenter also chronicles the role of organizations such as the National Association of Evangelicals and
Fuller Seminary for re-inventing evangelicalism as a relevant social force. Building on the prominence of progressive people of faith in the social reform movements of the
1960s, fundamentalists such as Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson crafted an evangelical
Christian movement that overcame denominational difference and formed a powerful
voting bloc. The Religious Right subsumed doctrinal differences in service to
conservative social goals, including the re-inscription of race, gender, and sexual norms that activists in the civil rights, women’s liberation, and gay liberation movements sought
to disrupt.67
Religious studies most often attend to the belief and behavior of those who
identify as Christian rather than discuss how Christian identity intersects with others, in
particular, race, and sexuality. An exception is David Chappell, who noted that
Bright and Campus Crusade for Christ: The Renewal of Evangelicalism in Postwar America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina, 2008). 66 I use the term “evangelical” because conservative fundamentalists and evangelicals came together to form the Religious Right and the former term is now rarely used is studies of faith-based activism. Nancy Ammerman notes that fundamentalists view compromise and accommodation as anathema, interpret the Bible literally and believe that Christ will soon return to earth. Evangelicals, Ammerman asserts, are more willing to compromise in order to achieve shared social and political objectives, less concerned with the imminence of Christ’s return and are more comfortable with the ambiguities of scripture when it is critically analyzed. Ammerman, Bible Believers, 89. 67 Ammerman, Bible Believers, Carpenter, Revive Us Again; Harding, The Book of Jerry Falwell; Jon A. Shields, The Democratic Virtues of the Christian Right.
34 commitment to racial segregation was not enough to mobilize whites across class during the civil rights movement but only a decade later the Religious Rights’ version of
Christianity began to achieve through religion what racism alone had not. Jon Shield’s
The Democratic Virtues of the Christian Right (2009) valorized Christian antireproductive rights activists for increasing the participation of white Americans who felt alienated and marginalized from the democratic process as a result of progressive movements to advance women’s liberation, black civil rights, and gay rights. Despite the number of threats to the lives and livelihoods of patients and the nurses and doctors who provide abortion services, Shields read the activism of conservative Christians as a democratic virtue. What stands out in the juxtaposition of these studies is that the same belief in the divinity of Jesus Christ inspires believers to fight for the expansion of civil rights in Chappell and their rescission in Shields. Moreover, they demonstrate how a sense of kairos has inspired Americans to profess and perform Christian Identity to effect social change.
Conclusion
As sites of community-building, political strategizing, and spiritual renewal, churches figure prominently in histories of American social movements. Therefore,
LGBT Christians’ confidence in church-centered narratives of civil rights led them to believe that “the church” had a responsibility to end religion-based anti-homosexual stigma and the violence it condoned. This is therefore a study of a movement that exemplifies changes in the way Americans understood the relationship between private religion and social reform. In contrast to studies that examine the relationship between
35 queer and Christian identity as either contentious or anomalous, Faith’s Queer Pleasures:
The Post-Civil Rights Politics of Race, Sexuality and Christian Identity looks at
Christians’ use of faith to counter anti-homosexual stigma, create new spiritual identities,
and forge communities that equally affirmed their spirituality and sexuality.
Before the 1960s there had been no comprehensive Christian challenge to the
religious underpinnings of legal discrimination against homosexuals. Christian lesbians
and gay men hid their attraction to members of the same sex. When acted upon, their
sexual desire was performed in secret and with trepidation. Exposure of their love and
desire might result in the loss of their families, faith communities, and jobs. Worse, some
feared that if they met misfortune before repenting they might die in their so-called sin.
By coming out of the “faith closet,” LGBT Christians transformed spiritual injury caused
by religious homophobia into activism. In so doing they exposed the underexamined
sexual heterogeneity of evangelical Christianity and the religious diversity of gays and
lesbians. Further, they troubled Christian justifications of homophobia by preaching a radically inclusive gospel of Jesus Christ: homosexuals were not only loved by God, they were made in God’s image. Gays and lesbians did not need to be healed or delivered.
Homosexuality was a gift from God.
36 Chapter 1: If Jesus Is the Answer, What Are the Questions?: How Americans Use the Simple and Social Gospels in Social Reform Movements and the Politics of Christian Identity
Histories of the African American civil rights movement promote an
understanding of religion as a tool for resisting the many forms of antiblack racism.68
Histories of post-civil-rights conservative Christianity chronicle the cross-denominational
mobilization of evangelicals and fundamentalists into a powerful voting bloc.69 These
studies often lack analysis of the ways Americans have imagined national unity through
the performance of Christian belief. By studying the performance of Christian belief—
that is, how believers ground prescriptive claims about American politics and culture in
their faith—it becomes clear that identifying as people of faith is one way that everyday
Americans articulate, debate, and reimagine American democracy, in particular who
deserves the rights and protections of citizenship. The fact that Christians are on either
side of two of the defining civil rights battles of the twentieth century, racial equity and
gay rights, raises the question of how exactly Jesus could be the answer to politically
polar dilemmas.
While the next three chapters explore LGBT Christianity and religious activism,
this chapter provides historical context for LGBT Christians’ efforts to launch a faith-
based gay rights movement and demonstrates how Christians have drawn on the same
faith tradition to argue for conflicting political objectives. “If Jesus Is the Answer, What
Are the Questions?” examines the inconsistency and even incoherence of Christianity
68 See note 62 for studies of African American religion Christianity. 69 Ammerman, Bible Believers; Carpenter, Revive Us Again; Harding, The Book of Jerry Falwell; Shields, The Democratic Virtues of the Christian Right.
37 through the rhetoric of white and black evangelicals in response to the fight for the civil
rights of African Americans. Evangelicals interpreted antiblack racism, and its redress, in
significantly different ways even though, ostensibly, they drew on the same Christianity.
The key to understanding these differences is whether Christians believed in the simple
gospel—that social problems, such as racial conflict, would be overcome if more people
accepted Jesus Christ as personal savior and lived in accordance with biblical
principles—or the social gospel—that personal salvation and living according to biblical
principles required direct intervention to address inequality and injustice.70 While both
gospels emphasize the importance of relationship with Jesus Christ, they preach two
ways of seeing the social significance of faith that provide a blueprint for understanding
how and why Americans have conflated private faith and American civil religion.
The chapter explores religion as lived experience through the way believers
engaged religious idioms during the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. era of the
black civil rights movement in order to understand what made it possible for Christians to
issue faith-based moral imperatives to both accept and resist racism and the implications
thereof for faith-based gay rights activism in following chapters. The King-era of civil
rights marked a shift in national religious discourse, as American religious leaders and
laity became commonsense arbiters of the significance of racial identity and the exigency
of ending segregation. Religion refers to the rituals, symbols, songs, liturgies and
doctrines—the nuts and bolts of Christian practice and belief. Religion as lived
70 The term “social gospel” can be traced to the 1907 book by Walter Rauschenbusch that identified the early twentieth century as a time of profound social crisis. Rauschenbusch prescribed a return to the Bible’s teachings about the Kingdom of God in order to create a more just society. He especially sought to help the urban poor. Walter Rauschenbusch, Christianity and the Social Crisis, ed. Paul Raushenbusch (New York: Harper & Row, 1907).
38 experience, or what scholar Robert Orsi has termed “lived religion,” refers to how people
use the nuts and bolts of religion to make rules about what we should believe and how we
should act.71 This chapter attends to “how particular people in particular places and
times, live in, with, through, and against the religious idioms available to them in
culture—all the idioms, including (often enough) those not explicitly their own.”72
Unlike studies of doctrines and denominations, lived religion is a way, in Orsi’s words, to understand: “the people’s religion defined as the totality of their ultimate values, their most deeply held ethical convictions, their efforts to order their reality, their cosmology.”73 In so doing, the chapter argues that the responses of people of faith to the
civil rights movement made apparent not only the degree of their investment in racial
inequality, but that a Christian Identity politics was at work.
Christian Identity politics refers to the use of religion to organize groups of people
by claiming a shared Christian identity. Such claims are intended to reference a single,
unifying faith tradition shared by people across race, class, gender and nationality who
profess faith in Jesus Christ. The evangelicals examined in this chapter, however, expose
the way shared Christian language and culture has been used to champion and hinder
social justice. Therefore, the guiding question in this study is not whether Christian
Identity politics is at work, but to what end. Evangelical segregationist Reverend Carl
McIntire argued it was wrong to use Christianity to advance black civil rights. By
comparison, Reverend William “Billy” Graham was far more progressive and is credited
71 Orsi, “Everyday Miracles,” 3–21. 72 Ibid., 7. 73 Robert Anthony Orsi, The Madonna of 115th Street: Faith and Community in Italian Harlem, 1880-1950 (New Haven, CT: Yale University, 1985), xvii.
39 for insisting on integrated audiences when preaching in the South—despite threats from
segregationists—although his 1964 sermon to Alabamans after the bombing of 16th
Street Baptist Church was a curious capitulation to Southern segregationists; he did not
rebuke the actions of white racists as much as fail to distinguish their racial animus from
the moral outrage of black people and their allies. In 1972, Reverend Graham served as
master of ceremonies at Explo ’72, the most racially integrated evangelical gathering to
date, where he and the other headliners asserted the simple gospel and conflated private
faith and American civil religion. Reverend Tom Skinner and Reverend William “Bill”
Pannell were prominent black evangelical contemporaries of Graham who preached the
social gospel and called their white siblings in Christ to task for the latter’s complicity in
racial violence and discrimination.
In order to understand why lesbian and gay Christians connected faith and social
equality during the modern gay rights movement (the focus of this study), it is useful to
examine the kinds of faith-based social and political action that defined Christian
activism in the 1960s. The ministries of Reverend Billy Graham and Reverend Martin
Luther King, Jr. were the most prominent examples of the simple gospel and the social
gospel, respectively.74 In particular, Christian arguments for and against integration
provide insight into how Christians used their faith to understand and influence shifting
racial dynamics. The civil rights movement—and, in particular, the prominence of clergy
in the movement—led lesbian and gay Christians to imagine a similar mobilization of people of faith to advance gay rights. Such hope arose from a mostly uncritical view of
74 Michael G. Long, Billy Graham and the Beloved Community: America’s Evangelist and the Dream of Martin Luther King, Jr. (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006).
40 Christianity as always and only a positive force for social justice. The end of de jure
racial segregation held different meanings to those who viewed the racial turmoil of the
1960s through the lens of faith. As this chapter demonstrates, believers in Christianity
made sense of past and present national conflict by asserting a trans-historical, trans-
cultural narrative that distills the meaning of current events through the lens of faith.
Christianity created a framework for understanding current social crises in one of two
ways: through the perspective of the social gospel or that of the simple gospel.75
Believers have been able to assert that Christian and civil religious ideals are interchangeable because Christianity has been the dominant religion in the United States.
Therefore, as Nancy Ammerman argues, reorienting studies of Christianity to focus on how people live it may yield new knowledge about the political implications of Christian belief: “by locating religion in practices rather than in ideas and authorities, we can gain a new perspective that will allow us to see how religious organizations and their members participate in the civic lives of their communities and how religious narratives are present in public action.”76 Ammerman suggests that Americans have used religion to express
private belief through civic participation. Americans across the political spectrum
deployed moral and Christian language in order to influence the way other citizens think
about contemporary social issues in and beyond the church. As racial integration became
the law of the land, conservative Christians—who had publicly eschewed mixing politics
and faith—became stalwarts of faith-based activism. In addition to highlighting
75 Because proponents of the social gospel so often champion issues of justice and equality, I use the terms “social gospel” and “social justice gospel” interchangeably. 76 Nancy T. Ammerman, “Religious Narratives in the Public Square,” in Taking Faith Seriously, ed. Mary Jo Bane, Brent Coffin, and Richard Higgins (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009).
41 Christianity as a critical category of identity, religious responses to black and gay civil rights movements demonstrate that the degree to which Americans upheld conservative social politics could largely be determined by whether they believed in the simple or social gospel. Most importantly, the notion of a single Christian gospel is what renders the faith promiscuous in American social politics—as resonant with champions of racial equality as segregationists, as compelling for LGBT believers as preachers of faith-based homophobia. Christian rhetoric is encoded with racial and sexual norms, the interpretation of which varies by the political persuasion of the listener. For this reason, the political performance of faith empowers believers to expand as much as police ways of being Christian and, more directly, what the faith means in practice.
Beyond well-worn debates over whether religion has been compensatory or liberatory, the Christians studied here demonstrate that “[r]eligious creativity is not intransitive. It is action on the world, made necessary and possible by particular circumstances in the world.”77 The next sections provide examples of Christians drawing on their faith in order to respond to the struggle for racial equality. The chapter concludes that we can better understand why the Christianities of conservatives and progressives differ by attending to what political invocations of the simple gospel and the social gospel reveal and obscure in conflicts over shifting conceptions of race, gender, and sexuality in late twentieth-century social reform movements.
The Simple Gospel
In numerous studies of Christian identity, believers use faith to make sense of
77 Orsi, “Everyday Miracles,” 8.
42 American politics and this section focuses on the simple gospel. A shared national
evangelical identity, created through the medium of radio in the 1940s by figures such as
Aimee Semple McPherson and Charles Fuller, made Christian communities of believers
who had historically avoided politics. 78 The National Association of Evangelicals (NAE)
was founded in 1942 to consolidate the influence of Christian conservatives within and
beyond recognized denominations. The evangelical parachurch organization Youth for
Christ launched the ministerial career of Reverend William “Billy” Graham, who became
“a leading proponent of a politicized religion that linked the gospel with the purposes of
the state.”79
Reverend Billy Graham was the 20th Century’s most respected preacher of the simple gospel. Beginning in the 1950s, Reverend Graham began to model a more politically engaged evangelicalism. He preached that churches had a special responsibility to provide spiritual leadership on what was euphemistically referred to as
“race relations.” Still, he adhered to a simple gospel message that relationship with Jesus
Christ changes the hearts of people such that, given time, racists would have a change of heart and stop committing state-sanctioned and extralegal violence against African
Americans. Graham corresponded with President Dwight Eisenhower about integration
after two white men in Mississippi murdered fourteen-year-old Emmett Till, who they claimed had flirted with a white woman (the wife of one of the murderers)—a cardinal
78 Tona J. Hangen’s (2002) Redeeming the Dial: Radio, Religion, and Popular Culture in America studied the relationship between evangelical religion and modern mass media, in particular, how the medium of radio created a national evangelical identity. Hangen, Redeeming the Dial. 79 Daniel Williams’s God's Own Party: The Making of the Christian Right shows that conservative Christians had been politically involved long before the emergence of the Religious Right in the 1980s. Through the 1950s their power as a voting bloc was weakened by debates about the inerrancy of scripture and African American civil rights. By the end of the 1960s, conservatives united to combat secularism, which they viewed as a greater threat than communism. Williams, God's Own Party, 22.
43 offense in the segregated South.80 In a June 4, 1956, letter to President Eisenhower,
Reverend Graham reported that he had “several private meetings with outstanding
religious leaders of both races, encouraging them to take a stronger stand in calling for
desegregation and yet demonstrating charity and, above all, patience. […] I believe the
Lord is helping us, and if the Supreme Court will go slowly and the extremists on both
sides will quiet down, we can have a peaceful social readjustment over the next ten-year
period.”81
Because neither Eisenhower nor Graham suffered under the threat of racialized
violence, they lamented “extremists on both sides,” equating Americans who suffered
and sought the end to such violence with those who perpetrated it. They suggested that
African Americans in right relationship with Christ would eschew social protest—from
marches and sit-ins to riots and antiestablishment rhetoric—and instead trust God to
deliver them from the violence enacted by their white brothers and sisters in Christ. They
believed brash acts were the greatest threat to peaceful, slow-but-steady progress toward
integration. The role of the church, then, was to justify a long view of justice, to
encourage more faith in God’s ultimate triumph over evil than outrage against antiblack
violence. This is not to suggest that Graham was not sincere in his support of
desegregation, or that he was immune to the threats from racists. Graham incurred the
80 The unconvicted murderer was enraged by the young man’s insistence that he was “as good as them” and boasted of sexual experiences with white women. Milam complained that they had only intended to beat fear of white people into the young man, but that they failed to frighten him. Desperate in the face of losing the power to instill fear, Milam shot Till and with Milam’s half-brother Bryant rolled Till’s body into the river. Look Magazine published the killers’ confessions. William Bradford Huie, “The Shocking Story of Approved Killing in Mississippi,” Look Magazine, January 24, 1956, 46–50. 81June 4, 1956, correspondence from Reverend Billy Graham to President Dwight Eisenhower, quoted in Steven P. Miller, Billy Graham and the Rise of the Republican South (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009), 53.
44 wrath of rabid segregationists in the Citizens’ Council, who were angry that he planned to
conduct an integrated revival in Dothan, Alabama, in 1965. Still, Graham would not
distinguish the moral contrast of the Christianity of those who gathered to worship that
Sunday, September 15, 1963, from the murderous Christianity of the Klan. Graham’s
commitment to the simple gospel did not allow such distinction because he believed
everyone needed forgiveness: “We are beginning to see that under certain circumstances,
all of us are capable of prejudice. This includes the Negro. I have had many Negroes tell
me that they have prejudice and hate in their hearts for the white man. Wherever
prejudice and hate exist, they are wrong. It is into this kind of situation that Christ can
come with the healing balm of Gilead. We must recognize the relationship between
Christianity and healthy racial conditions.”82 Graham suggests that within Christianity all
sin is wrong. Therefore, he cannot preach a sermon that distinguishes the murderous
hatred of Klansmen from the “prejudice and hatred” in the hearts of those victimized by
those Klansmen. As a result, the simple gospel often seems to affirm the status quo and
encourage prayerful complacency in the face of injustice.
Reverend Graham’s famous altar calls are perhaps the quintessential example of
late twentieth-century Christian conversions: publicly expressed private decisions to live
according to perceived Christian ideals. Yet, Graham’s own politics suggest that to
“accept Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior” is also to perceive religion through the lens of
one’s social identity: the statement above was part of a sermon addressed to a racially
integrated audience in Birmingham, Alabama, after the vicious bombing of the 16th
82 Reverend Billy Graham, Easter Sunday Address (Birmingham, AL 1964), accessed 3/12/2016: 858_FileCabinet_3291964_RadioAddress_Birmingham,AL_BirminghamAddress_-_-
45 Street Baptist Church, in which four little young girls were killed by white
supremacists.83 Through the bombing of the church, Klansmen expressed contempt for
black lives and the social gospel; the Church had been a gathering place for people
planning civil rights actions. Yet, at no point in the sermon does antiblack racism elicit
such direct rebuke. Invited to quell “racial tensions,” Graham instead asserted that all
Christians were culpable for the current “materialistic, secularistic, pleasure-made age” in which they lived. He further charged that none of them practiced “applied Christianity” but had instead created an “impotent Christ” whom they worshipped only on Sundays.
“We have made the mistake of dividing our lives into neat little compartments—politics in one section, economics in another, and religion poked back in the dark little corner for a few minutes on Sunday morning.”84 Graham even seems to espouse a social gospel in
this statement. But he soon quotes the words of Jesus to set up a call for faith that Christ
will fix the problems of Birmingham. “Jesus once said: ‘The spirit of the Lord is upon me
because He hath anointed me to preach the gospel to the poor. He hath sent me to heal the
broken-hearted, to preach deliverance to the captives, and recovering of sight to the blind,
to set at liberty them that are bruised.’ This is good news for the poor. This is good news
for the suffering. This is good news for the enslaved. This is good news for the blind.
Christ can indeed cope with the social and political problems of the world.”85
By using faith to sidestep the criminal and moral culpability of those who bombed
83 White racists were angered by threats to segregation. Birmingham public schools were facing a federal court order to admit black students that September. Governor George Wallace publicly threatened violent resistance to desegregation and demonstrated the complicity of the state in the tragedy. See Taylor Branch, Parting the Danger Waters: America in the King Years, 1954-1963 (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1989), 888–92. 84 Reverend Billy Graham, Easter Sunday Address. 85 Ibid.
46 the church, Graham’s leadership shored up the Southern culture from which he came. In a
radio address following the bombing Graham disingenuously suggested that the real
culprits were “professionals from outside Alabama who want to keep racial tensions at a
fever pitch in the South.”86 He sincerely believed that preaching the gospel would change the hearts, minds, and actions of everyone who accepted Jesus Christ as personal Savior.
For this reason, Graham cautioned that “[t]he church should not answer questions the people aren’t asking. We’ve become advisors, social engineers, foreign policy experts, when we should be answering the questions of the soul. Christ taught that man must be first born again.”87 It is important to note, however, that Graham was more
compassionate and more influential than more conservative segregationist evangelicals.
He differed significantly from Christian segregationists, such as evangelical Reverend
Carl McIntyre, who later opposed the 1964 Civil Rights Act. In a passionate letter to
President Lyndon B. Johnson, McIntire wrote that the civil disobedience of the civil
rights movement was tantamount to apostasy: “This idea that everybody is a child of God
and that the universal brotherhood of man is taught in the holy scriptures is completely
wrong, and yet this legislation is built upon this erroneous concept of man. It is my firm
belief that what this nation needs is not federal legislation [the Civil Right Act] but our
people need to be brought face to face with the eternal law of God as set forth in your
mother’s bible. [. . .] When men turn away from the Bible and its teachings, they look to
86 Quoted in David Sehat, The Myth of American Religious Freedom (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 243. 87 Reverend Billy Graham quoted in Marshall Frady, “God, Man and the South,” Atlantic Monthly 219 (January 1967), 40; Charles P. Roland, The Improbable Era: The South since World War II (Lexington, KY: University of Kentucky Press, 1976); Miller, Billy Graham and the Rise of the Republican South.
47 the State and its power.”88
McIntire rebuked Johnson and other civil rights supporters for supplanting divine
authority with the authority of the state. Invoking Johnson’s mother’s Bible, he reminded
the president that the Bible provided justification for antiblack racism. McIntire retained
his fundamentalist opposition to human rights and worked to convince black Americans
that they had not experienced racism, but that racial inequality was part of God’s divine
order.89 In contrast, Reverend Graham at least acknowledged the reality of racism and
deserves credit for his leadership of white Southern evangelicals on the subject.
Nevertheless, he used religion to conflate white supremacists’ animosity or antipathy
with the moral outrage of black people in response to physical and structural violence
Such conflation is the heart of the simple gospel and is, therefore, powerless to uproot
white supremacy. As the following section will demonstrate, conservative religious
defenses of antiblack racism lost ground to a multicultural simple gospel that obscured
the realities of racial inequality. In 1972, evangelicals orchestrated a “gospel explosion:”
Explo ’72 was a racially diverse national youth event with people from around the world
that preached that everyone was equally sinful and needed to accept Jesus Christ as personal savior.
Explo ’72
The defining event of the Jesus movement, Explo ’72, was organized by a
88 Johnson was sworn in using his mother’s Bible. “Johnson, Humphrey Sworn into Office under Protection of Un-parallelled Security,” Toledo Blade (January 20, 1965). Carl McIntire to Lyndon Baines Johnson, March 26, 1964, Carl McIntire Papers, Princeton Theological Seminary. 89 Betty Medsger, “Black Manifesto Challenged by Dr. McIntire in Abington,” Philadelphia Bulletin (July 21, 1969). http://www.carlmcintire.org/newspapers-bulletin-690721.php
48 national staff led by Dr. William H. “Bill” Bright and the week of events was emceed by
Reverend Billy Graham in Dallas, Texas, from June 12–17, 1972. Bright, the founder of
Campus Crusade for Christ, and Reverend Graham designed the event to evangelize
American youth. The full name of Explo ’72 was the International Student Congress on
Evangelism. Whether speakers evangelized through sermons or songs, they each
reinforced the message that the conversion experience included having “the answer” to
the most vexing social issues of the day. In this way, the lived experience of spiritual
salvation included viewing the politics of the nation through the lens of faith. As an
example, Explo ’72 organizers touted the event as the most diverse evangelical gathering
in history. The event boasted a multiracial roster of performers, including Andraé Crouch
and The Disciples, Johnny Cash, Native American singer and actress Rita Coolidge, her
then-husband actor Kris Kristofferson, Willa Mae Dorsey, and the white Southern Gospel
legends the Speers.
Many of the Christian leaders who attended reported that it “was the most
significant Christian event since Pentecost.”90 Comments by Reverend Graham at Explo
’72 demonstrate the temporal claims woven throughout evangelical rhetoric. Graham told
the crowd of “fearless” youth that they were entrusted with the same charge that Jesus
had given his disciples two thousand years before: “Go ye into all the world and preach
the gospel.”91 Graham contrasted the “world of despair” in which they lived with the
hope of Christ that lived in them. The young Christians, he stated, were contemporary
90 Reverend William Bill Bright, foreword to The Explo ’72 Story: A Plan to Change the World, by Paul Eshelman and Norman Rohrer (Glendale, CA: G/L Publications, 1972). 91 Paul Eshelman and Norman Rohrer, The Explo ’72 Story: A Plan to Change the World (Glendale: G/L Publications, 1972), 92.
49 disciples of Christ: “The future is yours.”92 He also drew on the zeitgeist of protest and
revolution but tempered the possibility for either by claiming evangelism as the proper
response to contemporary politics, stating: “[I]f we are going to revolutionize the world,
we must have the same message, the same discipline, the same dedication, the same
consecration, and the same willingness to die that those early apostles had.”93 Graham
told the youth that by putting their hand in the hand of the man from Galilee that they
would be empowered to: “[P]ut your hand in the hand of a person of another race. You
have a new love in your heart that will drive you to do something about poverty, the
ecology, the racial tension, the family problems and, most of all, to do something about
your own life.”94 In other words, evangelical proponents of the simple gospel preached
that relationship with Christ would compel folks to “do something.” Unfortunately, that
“something” most often involved being convinced of one’s own salvation and calling
others to accept Jesus as savior but required little to challenge or change any of the social
ills enumerated. Explo ’72’s headliners preached the simple gospel by encouraging
Christians and potential converts of all races to believe that the answers they sought to
social problems could only be found in Jesus Christ. Importantly, proponents of the simple gospel did recognize injustice, but they explained it either as part of God’s plan or trusted that it would be rectified at some indefinite future time. African American evangelicals such as Andraé Crouch, a legend in 1970s contemporary gospel music who grew up in the black Pentecostal tradition, also preached the simple gospel as humankind’s best hope for peace and prosperity.
92 Ibid. 93 Ibid. 94 Ibid, 92–93.
50 In 1972, when Andraé Crouch and his twin sister Sandra wrote the lyrics: “Jesus is the answer for the world today/Above Him there’s no other/Jesus is the way,” they set the simple gospel to music in a triumphant narrative of late twentieth-century evangelical politics. The song assured believers that the gospel of Jesus Christ was the answer to every brand of social division, including racism. The music of Crouch, which was performed by his popular group The Disciples at Explo ’72, fluidly complemented the work of Bright and Graham in that it advanced a faith-based politic purported to transcend race, class, and histories of oppression. Crouch’s lyrics invite inquiry into the ways that a focus on shared Christian identity muted critiques of structural inequality.95
For example, in the 1980 Grammy Award performance and acceptance speech for the album I’ll Be Thinking of You, Crouch was able to reimagine the meaning of the enslavement of his ancestors by reading the racial violence upon which the nation’s wealth had been built through his relationship with Christ. Crouch, born and raised in
California, was the son of a prominent pastor in the Pentecostal denomination, the
Church of God in Christ, and The Disciples are among the musicians who provided the soundtrack for the Jesus movement. Although the Jesus movement died out in 1980, the
Andraé Crouch wrote timeless songs secured his place in gospel music history. That year,
95 Andraé Crouch wrote hundreds of songs that have become classics of contemporary gospel. Referenced above, “Jesus is the Answer” assures the singer/listener that relationship with Christ is the answer to every question and challenge they may face. They speak to a universal faith in the redeeming power of Christ but suggest that salvation itself is the answer to social inequality—a claim undermined by religious defenses of inequality, including Crouch in 1980. “Jesus is the answer, for the world today, Above Him there's no other, Jesus is the way. 3x Verse One: If you have some questions. In the corners of your mind, Traces of discouragement, The peace you cannot find, Reflections of your past, Seem to face you everyday. But this one thing I do know, Jesus is the way.”
51 their performance of a spirited rendition of the song “Jesus is Lord” roused the Grammy’s
audience, with Christians in the audience recognizing the lyrics as a modernized version
of New Testament passages that prophesied “every knee shall bow and every tongue
confess” knowledge of Christ. Andraé vamped “Gentile and Jew—that includes me and
you!—they’re gonna bow down!” as The Disciples sweetly echoed “bow down” for
emphasis. In accepting the Grammy, Crouch first offered thanks to the National
Association of Recording Arts and Sciences but then expressed gratitude to his white
Christian brothers and sisters: “I’d like to thank your forefathers for telling our
forefathers that Jesus is Lord.” Lastly, Crouch thanked “the Lord Jesus Christ: He is my
music. He is my song.” In that moment, Crouch stood as an example of the simple
gospel’s promise: that whites who embraced their black brothers and sisters in the Lord
would be met by blacks grateful that their ancestors had been introduced to
Christianity—despite slavery, the domestic terrorism, and racial recidivism that countervailed against black self-determination in the postemancipation period known as
Reconstruction and the de jure and de facto racial segregation that became
insurmountable for the masses of black Americans through the end of the twentieth
century. Crouch authored songs that are cherished standards in churches across race,
denomination, and nationality, and his music ministry is celebrated as proof that Christian
identity trumps all other identities and promises triumph over racism, internalized
oppression, and economic inequality. Indeed this was the central reason for Crouch and
Disciples’ platform at Explo ’72. The multiracial group embodied the simple gospel’s
message that Christian identity is more important than any other. Whether sung by
Crouch or preached by Graham, evangelical claims of the sovereignty of Christ worked
52 to obscure the fact that religion, like race, gender, and sexual identity, is a social
construct and could not therefore lead a path out of “the project of belonging” that
systemic oppression operationalizes.96
Graham, Bright, and their staff deliberately recruited black instructors and leaders
for the week of workshops and trainings and claimed three thousand African American
delegates. Chuck Singleton, the Campus Crusade for Christ coordinator of black
ministries, admitted it was a small number by comparison to the total attendees but within
the history of evangelical Christian gatherings Singleton said those small numbers
created “the most Technicolor [evangelical gathering] I’ve seen compared to past
Campus Crusade events and other revivals.”97 In keeping with the “ethnic reverie” of the
period, the black caucus was named Wantu Wazuri, a Swahili term meaning “beautiful
people,” which was also a slogan of the Johnson Company’s popular multimillion-dollar- grossing Afro-Sheen advertising campaign. On the second night of the event, black conservative Republican pastor Reverend Edward Vincent “E.V.” Hill exhorted the crowd to recognize that the remedy to their personal problems and those facing the world is found in the love that “only comes from God through faith in Jesus Christ.”98 Hill
embodied faith-inspired racial reconciliation and his fiery style of preaching brought the
passion of black Christian oratory to a post-civil-rights gospel that worked to suborn
96 In The Erotic Life of Racism, critical race theorist Sharon Patricia Holland defines the project of belonging as a 1) function of the everyday-ness of racism and 2) signifier of two sets of relations: blood (i.e., family) and identification (“a belonging usually imposed by a community or by one’s own choice”). Evangelical Christianity actually relies on both. Believers are said to be children of God as a consequence of having been cleansed of their sins by the “blood of Jesus Christ.” In this way, religion creates community as “consanguinity.” Sharon Patricia Holland, The Erotic Life of Racism (Durham, NC: Duke University, 2012), 3–4. 97 Quoted in Eshelman and Rohrer, The Explo ’72 Story, 56. 98 Eshelman and Rohrer, The Explo ’72 Story, 65.
53 racial inequality to the belief that all possessed equal access to salvation through Jesus
Christ. Adding presidential imprimatur to the primacy of Christian identity, President
Richard Nixon spoke to the crowd via telegram:
From the earliest days of the colonists and settlers, a faith in God and a devotion to His works has given Americans the strength to overcome seemingly insurmountable problems of poverty, injustice and suffering. Courage, persistence and ingenuity all played a part in those past successes but they would have been useless without an underlying faith. This massive gathering of the Campus Crusade is heartening evidence that the students and young people of America are growing stronger in that faith; that many of them are discovering that the way to change the world for the better is to change ourselves for the better.99
Read through the lens of racial politics at the time, Nixon’s words indirectly enabled
listeners to situate the black freedom struggle of the civil rights era within the nation’s
romantic history of colonial America and “the conceit of the ‘nation of immigrants’” that
historian Matthew Jacobson identifies as an article of civil-religious faith.100 Christians
who professed faith in God’s omnipotence were encouraged to see personal salvation as
not only the key to eternal life, but as a unifying force in the here and now.
Key figures in the ascendancy of the New Christian Right, including Bright and
Graham, financed and orchestrated Explo ’72 and other evangelistic campaigns that
preached Jesus as the answer to every challenge facing the nation, from the Vietnam War,
urban and rural poverty, and continuing race and gender politics. Figures such as Bright,
Graham, and, later, Reverend Jerry Falwell used Christian sentiment to translate political
conservatism into an ostensibly expansive Jesus politics. Christian opposition to gay
rights, including the refusal to recognize gay and lesbian Christians, is therefore a
99 Emphasis added. Eshelman and Rohrer, Explo ’72, 12–13. Turner, Bill Bright and Campus Crusade for Christ, 144. 100 Matthew Jacobson, Roots Too: White Ethnic Revival in Post-Civil Rights America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University, 2006), 9.
54 diagnostic of power in that the emphasis on personal salvation foreclosed an analysis of
unresolved and ongoing inequality between men and women, Christians and non-
Christians, blacks and whites, as well as heterosexuals on the one hand and gays and
lesbians on the other. The post-civil-rights gospel of the New Christian Right asserted
that the equality of human beings was contingent upon their relationship to Jesus Christ,
rather than their social or economic status. Yet, the leadership and rhetoric of this
multiracial brand of the Christian gospel reveal the way religion helped to maintain
inequality. In terms of increasing representation of the racial diversity of “the body of
Christ,” Explo ’72 was a success. Bright, Graham, and the roster of speakers and
performers at Explo ’72 used differences of race and gender to shore up the idea of a
shared Christian identity and thereby created a Christian “linked-fate politics,” consonant with so-called colorblind conservatism.
Still, event organizers could not completely ignore the advent of the black power movement and its implications for evangelical Christianity. Just three years before Explo
’72, Dr. James H. Cone had authored a theology of black liberation that challenged people within and beyond Christian communities. Cone, a black Christian theologian who had become “disgusted with the oppression of black people in America and with the scholarly demand to be ‘objective about it,” argued that “Black Power […] is, rather,
Christ’s central message to twentieth century America. And unless the empirical denominational church makes a determined effort to recapture the man Jesus through total identification with the suffering poor as expressed in Black Power, that church will
55 become exactly what Christ is not.” 101 Cone denounced the kind of dispassionate
response to racism that proponents of the simple gospel advanced. Moreover, he
demonstrated how black Christians’ faith had been challenged by the assassination of Dr.
King when he claimed “a certain dark joy” in writing the text “not chiefly for black
people. No one can advise another on when or how to die. This is a word to the
oppressor, a word to Whitey, not in hope that he will listen (after King’s death who can
hope?) but in the expectation that my own existence [as a black Christian] will be
clarified.”102 Nothing at Explo ‘72 came close Cone’s challenge, but event organizers
recognized the need to address difference. They offered “interracial dialogues” and
popular black evangelical Reverend Tom Skinner gave a lecture on black theology that
introduced attendees to “what God has to say about black people’s struggle and black
people’s destiny in America.”103
Simple gospel proponents imagined that accepting Jesus Christ as savior and
identifying as a person of faith was superior to other ways of identifying, like race,
gender, and sexuality. This construction of the gospel appealed to Americans who were
weary from the social unrest of the 1960s. Importantly, Christians such as Reverend
Skinner also believed in the transforming power of Jesus Christ but were weary of the
injustices that the civil rights movement illuminated and that weariness demanded a
social gospel, one relevant to the lived experiences of oppressed people.
101 Cone’s book has become a classic in progressive theological circles. James H. Cone, Black Theology and Black Power, 20th anniversary ed. (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1998), 1-2. 102 Ibid, 3. 103 Eshelman and Rohrer, The Explo ’72 Story, 33.
56 The Social Gospel
For proponents of the social gospel, or social justice gospel, relationship with
Jesus Christ required thoughtful resistance to social inequality as much as prayer. Faith in
divine sovereignty did not nullify Christians’ responsibility to denounce and disrupt
racism and other forms of oppression. Events such as Explo ’72 were evidence that many
evangelical Christians worked toward a more racially and culturally diverse movement
by the end of the 1960s. Even so, to social-justice-minded evangelicals, Christianity did not nullify the white supremacist underpinnings of the simple gospel. As a result, the gospel of Jesus Christ could not render black evangelicals impervious to racism. In the words of Reverend William Pannell, “I am an evangelical. And I am an American, but I am also a black evangelical and a black American and that’s a different thing.”104
According to Reverend Pannell and Reverend Tom Skinner, their faith was different
because, at its root, “the simple gospel” provided a theological escape for those unwilling
to directly confront social and economic inequality:
[P]residents of Christian colleges, sometimes by people who ran PR for [Billy] Graham [would tell us] “the secret to Mr. Graham’s success is that he preaches the simple gospel.” And I’d look some of these guys in the eye and ask, “What’s so simple about the gospel?” And that usually meant an end to the conversation. […] Because we began to realize that that so-called simple gospel wasn’t simple. And that it had ramifications that if expounded upon and practiced would begin to scratch where people itched in the cities in ways it didn’t seem to have to scratch for people who lived in the suburbs.105
Here Pannell is using “the city” to reference resource-poor communities of color and “the
suburbs” to reference resource-rich communities, but the “itch” referred to more than
104 Interview of William E. Pannell, “Evangelicalism in Black and White” (2012), accessed April 3, 2015: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JG4Zm86EY3k. 105 William Pannell Oral History. Billy Graham Center Archives, Collection 498, T6.
57 economic inequality. If the gospel was in fact liberating for all believers, Pannell argues,
then the application of the gospel of Jesus Christ would liberate African Americans and
white people from the pernicious effects of racism. This conception of liberation was
consistent with Graham’s vision of what it meant to be in relationship with Christ,
however it simply left the work of social change in the hands of the same people who had
no reason to give up whatever social privilege they enjoyed. Rather, such Christians
constructed faith communities to exempt that privilege from critique.
Reverend Pannell’s 1968 book, My Friend the Enemy, was one of the first texts by a black evangelical to explicitly denounce racism within the church. The book emerged from his increasing sense of alienation from white evangelicals due to their unwillingness to give up social privilege based on race. Pannell found that “white flight” to the suburbs and away from the social unrest in American cities reflected a conditional commitment to Christian evangelism.
Perhaps I am making too much of [the church’s unwillingness to address racial inequality]? After all, isn’t our “citizenship in heaven?” Yes, but that gives little balm when viewing the bloodied form of a twelve-year-old lying face down on Newark’s cold pavement. Scriptural quotations about the end time and the spirit of the age fail to sooth a breaking spirit when one views children looting a neighborhood store for a paltry bag of potato chips. But what would my white brother know of this? He taught me to sing, “Take the World, But Give Me Jesus.” I took Jesus. He took the world and then voted right wing to insure his property rights. A riot can make you feel more lonely than suburbia will ever know. 106
He had been a regular traveling minister in predominantly white evangelical churches. He
came to realize that the acceptance of people he met on the circuit “was conditioned by
my relationship to a suitcase. A singing Negro has always been welcome as long as he is
106 William E. Pannell, My Friend the Enemy (Waco, TX: Word Books, 1968), 54–56.
58 a vagabond and has no intention to settle with his family.”107 He was troubled by this conditional acceptance but not deterred from Christian community. The bombing of the
16th Street Baptist Church, however, convinced Pannell that his white evangelical siblings in Christ churches were complicit in antiblack discrimination and violence worldview:
… with horror and unbelief I watched the removal of four little bodies from the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham. The hatebomb had been well planted and no lesson on love could snuff out the fuse.… I underestimated my own pride of race and overestimated the compassion and commitment to justice of my white friends. I now knew I could no longer be a standard evangelical Christian, content to merely preach a typical evangelical Gospel. This ghastly event … happened in the “Bible belt.” The time had come to reevaluate the Gospel in terms of its meaning and application for our times. For me the illusion was over.108
As the work of black evangelicals William Pannell and Tom Skinner indicate, the difference between proponents of the social gospel and preachers of the simple gospel were especially pronounced during the civil rights era. Although most churches did not support King, it was not because they doubted that God wanted an end to antiblack violence and discrimination. Rather, the concern was white backlash against the strivings of people who were already socially vulnerable. Importantly, after the church bombing and again after the assassination of Dr. King, black evangelicals, who were otherwise convinced of the life-changing power of Jesus Christ, became emboldened to denounce the racism that underlay the broader evangelical movement during this time. “The White community can afford the luxury of being evangelical without exploring all of the implications of that in matters of justice and mercy. It doesn’t trickle down. It doesn’t have to. But from the bottom up, how do you take those same values and beliefs to find
107 Ibid., 63. 108 Ibid., 54–56.
59 righteousness and justice? Fidelity to scripture means folks are reading the text from
below and they get a different [message].”109
Reverend Tom Skinner’s testimony often included an account of his life as a
“preacher’s kid” and unlikely leader of the Harlem Lords, a gang in Harlem, New York.
As a teenager, he was introduced to a different interpretation of scripture when he
frequented a black nationalist bookstore where on any given day he might see Malcolm X
or Louis Farrakhan (then Louis X). In a 1990 interview Skinner recalled that when Adam
Clayton Powell also stopped by, the men would engage in first-rate debates on race,
religion, and civil rights. Skinner recalled that the nationalists believed Jesus was a black
man and referenced John’s vision on the Isle of Patmos in Revelation 1:14–15, which
said that the Lamb of God had hair as lamb’s wool and feet were as though they had been
burned in a furnace. Skinner’s own belief before conversion was that Jesus was a
historical figure, probably a black man, who had done good things while on earth and
was for liberation of the oppressed. He had had several school teachers who were black
nationalists who assured him that black Christians had been brainwashed. They told
young Tom that Christianity, as taught to black people in America, was “really a white
man’s religion given to black people to keep them in their place.” 110 The teachers warned
that any black kid who wanted to be successful had to jettison Christian belief. As
evidence, they pointed to the fact that leading proponents of hate, segregation, and
bigotry were Christians, which explained why Sunday morning at 11:00—when believers
gathered in segregated faith communities—was said to be the most segregated hour in
109 Interview of William E. Pannell, “Evangelicalism in Black and White.” 110 Tom Skinner Oral History Transcript. Interviewed by Robert Shuster, June 13, 1990. Billy Graham Center Archives. Collection 430, Tom Skinner, T1–T2.
60 America. After accepting Jesus Christ as savior, Skinner began to imagine a Christianity
with practical implications for socially oppressed people.
Skinner founded his ministry in 1964 and remained one of the most influential
black progressive evangelicals until his death in 1994. Skinner preached that faith in
Christ compels direct and active efforts to end inequality now. After being with Andraé
Crouch at Explo ’72 and hearing “Jesus is the Answer, Skinner responded to Crouch’s
melodic assertion with the book If Christ Is the Answer, What Are the Questions?
According to Reverend Skinner, Christ and early followers of Jesus were countercultural.
The first-century Christian church was more effective than churches in the 1970s because
the first followers of Jesus were “so anti-system and so anti-establishment [that] they
were being put to death for professing to be Christians […] because the values and
priorities of those people who were following Jesus Christ were in direct contradiction to
the values of the system.”111
“The system” is a phrase that has since fallen out of use in progressive parlance in
favor of terms such as “institutional racism” and “structural inequality.” However, the
phrase was once a convenient catch-all for governmental and social networks by which class differences were maintained. Skinner said that if churches were “truly doing the
Jesus thing, truly confronting the world with truth about Jesus Christ, and truly practicing justice and mercy and love … living truth as Jesus Christ and His New Testament church did—we would be illegal today.”112 On his reading, one of the functions of Jesus’s
ministry was to “destroy the works of the devil.” Folks who were sincerely following
111 Reverend Tom Skinner, If Christ is the Answer, What are the Questions? (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 1974), 50. 112 Ibid., 51.
61 Christ would do likewise. Skinner argued that “many works of the devil were being manifested in institutional, governmental, and business forms.”113 This critique of the church and society marks the most significant distinction between the social gospel and the simple gospel. Whereas the simple gospel argues that right relationship with God will eventually transform the individual to be more just, the social gospel focuses on the way inequality works in the lives of the most marginalized: “The oppression of Indians,
Chicanos, and Blacks in America is the work of the devil. Poverty, hunger, racism, war, and militarism are works of the devil. Greed, envy, pride and jealousy are works of the devil. Any person, therefore, who is a follower of Jesus Christ would be out to destroy these works and he would eventually become out of step or even illegal in the kind of society in which we live.”114 Importantly, Skinner did not rank some sins as worse but believed that people sin according to the means available to them:
If I were a thief in Harlem, where I was born and raised, I would have to raid people’s apartments, jump people on the streets, snatch people’s pocketbooks, hold up or rob stores and rob people on elevators. But if I were the businessman living in a suburban community I would not steal that way. I would steal by padding my business account, cheating on my income taxes, taking kickbacks in my business, promising promotions to people if they extended […] money and favors to me […] Therefore we must not judge the outworking of sin because it will change, depending on the geographic location in which one lives.115
For Skinner and fellow black evangelicals, spiritual conversion was incomplete without a political conversion to upsetting the status quo.
White conservative evangelicals, on the other hand, preached the gospel message in order to inspire unconverted listeners to accept Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior. They
113 Ibid., 50. 114 Ibid., 50. 115 Ibid., 21.
62 inspired converted listeners, in this regard, to renew or strengthen their relationship with
Jesus Christ. Yet, conversion also has significant social implications in that it provides
Christian justification for affect. In the period following the King era of civil rights,
Christians were divided by whether they saw racist and homophobic bigotry and violence as individual acts that could be forgiven by private acts of penitence as often as committed, or as contemporary instances of historical inequality that required redress by church and society at large. Right-wing evangelical leaders such as Reverend Jerry
Falwell admonished readers that their own “moral and political” decisions and behaviors created the conditions for the social and political problems they saw in the United States:
Too many Americans blame our corrupt politicians for “the sad state we find America in today.” [But] it is we, the American people who voted them into office. Now is the time to face the truth responsibly and do something to turn America around. […] We can talk about inflation, about big government, about crime in the streets, about America’s lack of defense [but] the fact remains that at the root of America’s problems today is the decay of our individual and national morals. […] The choices we as Americans have made in moral and religious questions have determined the way America is going today.116
Falwell’s message is that conservative Christians should evidence the strength of their relationship with Jesus Christ through civic engagement. Moreover, he is saying that
Christians can create the kind of country they want by living according to the ideals of their faith traditions. This faith-informed, creative potential is what has made American religion a powerful social and political force since the American Revolution. Nathan O.
Hatch’s important study on the democratization of American Christianity in the
Revolutionary period argued that evangelical Christianity empowered ordinary people.
These believers did not defer to clergy or theologians; their piety was as valid and
116 Emphasis added. Falwell, Listen, America!, 56.
63 important as that of so-called elites. As a result, “they dreamed that a new age of religious
and social harmony would naturally spring up out of their efforts to overthrow coercive
and authoritarian structures.”117 This brand of Christianity infused individual Christian
belief and practice with social meaning, resulting in “the incarnation of the church into
popular culture.”118 This incarnation means, however, that there is no such thing as a
simple gospel because it grounds radically different political agendas. In the words of Dr.
James Cone, as he reflected on the impetus for his black liberation theology: “When the
murderers of humanity seize control of the public meaning of the Christian faith, it is
time to seek new ways of expressing the truth of the gospel.”119 Conservative Christians
used religion to justify social inequality just as the Christians documented in the
following two chapters used it to argue for the expansion of civil rights to gays and
lesbians. A faith tradition that figures as prominently in histories of oppression as histories of liberation struggles requires greater attention to the specific interests and investments people express through the assertion of Christian Identity.
Conclusion
From the abolition of slavery and the temperance movement in the nineteenth
century to the long fight for black civil rights and the rise of the Religious Right at the
end of the twentieth century, Americans have linked private religion and social reform in
powerful and conflicting ways.120 Proponents of the simple gospel preached that
117 Hatch, American Christianity, 9–11. 118 Ibid., 9. 119 James H. Cone, My Soul Looks Back (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1986), 43. 120 Presbyterian revivalist Charles Grandison Finney (1792–1895) used altar calls to enlist new Christian converts in the Abolition Movement, famously linking spiritual redemption and social reform. James H. Moorhead, “Social Reform and the Divided Conscience of Antebellum Protestantism,” Church History 48,
64 relationship with Jesus Christ is the only answer to social problems, especially
contemporary conflicts over race, gender, and sexuality. Indeed, the Bible has been
invoked as a timeless blueprint that provides specific instructions for performing the only
identity that matters, that of the follower of Jesus Christ. Proponents of the social gospel
have interpreted the life and ministry of Jesus as an indictment of Christian and political
figures who oppress the poor and powerless. They preached that a true follower of Christ
was compelled to champion issues of justice and equality in word and deed. Beyond
claims of ultimate or sacred truth, then, Christians have asserted Christian belief to justify
both support for and opposition to the expansion of civil rights protections.
Personal salvation is always a social project, for the individual reimagines her
relationship to others through the new relationship with Jesus Christ. This project
necessarily centers the distinction between the simple gospel and the social gospel in
order to glean the importance of LGBT Christianity, especially how it differed from other
kinds of Christian activism in late-twentieth-century America. In making this distinction, this chapter—“If Jesus Is the Answer, What Are the Questions”—highlights the centrality of race and processes of racialization in both simple and social constructions of the “good news” of Jesus Christ. It demonstrates that American evangelical Christianity—whether articulated by conservatives or liberals—is an important way to understand how individuals holding different, and even oppositional, social investments can use the same system of belief to significantly different ends.
no. 4 (1979): 416–30. For more information on the connection between religion and politics, see the chapter “Revivalism, Race, and Reform: The Roots of Modern Evangelical Politics” in Peter G. Heltzel, Jesus and Justice: Evangelicals, Race, And American Politics (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009); Hatch, American Christianity.
65 Scholars have tended to treat separately issues of race and sexuality in studies of
faith-based social activism. Yet, white evangelicals began to reckon with their attitudes
toward race and black evangelicals began to call out racism within the faith in the 1960s.
At the same time, progressive Christians were giving serious consideration to the issue of
gay rights. As Heather R. White noted of the ministers affiliated with the Council on
Religion and the Homosexual: “clergy, as authoritative spokespersons, brought
respectability and credibility to gays’ unheeded efforts to challenge police repression and
social injustice.”121 Moreover, these parallel developments echo the simultaneity of the development of categories of race and sexual identity chronicled in the work of literary
scholars such as Tracy Fessenden and historian Siobhan Somerville. Fessenden
demonstrates American jurisprudence as a culture of redemption in which “an implicitly
Christian culture puts pressure on all who make claims on American institutions to
constitute themselves as religious on a recognizably Protestant model.”122 In other words,
Americans who perceive Christian identity as a form of social capital deploy it to expand
or curtail access to the right to vote, the right to self-expression, and other rights of
citizenship. Somerville argued “that questions of race—in particular the formation of
notions of ‘whiteness’ and ‘blackness’—must be understood as a crucial part of the
history and representation of sexual formations, including lesbian and gay identity and
compulsory heterosexuality in the United States.”123 The relationship between race and
sexuality takes on added meaning in discussions of religion. Heather White’s 2015 book
121 White, Reforming Sodom, 74. 122 Tracy Fessenden, Culture and Redemption: Religion, the Secular and American Literature (Princeton: Princeton University, 2007), 4. 123 Siobhan B. Somerville, Queering the Color Line: Race and the Invention of Homosexuality in American Culture (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000), 5.
66 Reforming Sodom: Protestants and the Rise of Gay Rights historicizes Christian
perspectives on same sex desire to show that biblical condemnation of homosexuality
was an invention of the twentieth century. In White’s words, liberal and conservative
Americans “put sexual pleasure to work” to create norms about gender and sexuality that
celebrated heterosexual sex within marriage as a gift from God. By contrast, the word
sodomy: “also worked as a multipurpose polemic against perceived enemies of the faith;
it was a slur that identified Muslim infidels, American Indian pagans, perverse Papists,
sodomitical Reformers and so on with monstrous animality and idolatrous perversity. To
name ‘same-sex acts’—or even simply sex—as a continuous link through history sloughs off contingent meanings of religious, racial and colonial alterity.”124
The racialization of normative sexuality in Christian teaching calls attention to
how these categories of identity are mutually constitutive. The evangelicals discussed in
this chapter demonstrate religion as a social construct—like race, gender, and sexuality—
through which people identify and are identified by others. They demonstrate that people
make sense of the field of power in which majoritarian and minoritarian groups struggle
for status and resources through varying processes of Christian identification and
disidentification. “Field of power,” as explained by sociologist David Swartz, references
Pierre Bourdieu’s theory of domination and stratification: “Practices occur in structured
arenas of conflict called fields. This central concept in Bourdieu's sociology connects the
action of habitus to the stratifying structures of power in modern society. Bourdieu
conceptualizes modern society as an array of relatively autonomous but structurally
homologous fields of production, circulation, and consumption of various forms of
124 White, Reforming Sodom,74.
67 cultural and material resources. Fields mediate the relationship between social structure
and cultural practice.”125 Within the field of Christianity believers have asserted
spiritual/moral ideals to justify various kinds of social power—whether to maintain
power over others or to shift existing power in favor of those on the margins of society.
Christianity has been a powerful trope of moral rightness in American politics because of
the difficulty in challenging the conflation of private faith and civil religion. This
conflation melds private notions of moral rectitude with political claims about who
deserves to benefit from the rights of citizenship and whose civil discontent deserves
equal protection under the law. In debates over the expansion of civil rights, therefore, it
is as much a prescriptive expression of political conviction as of faith in God.
Recently scholars have begun to write about the multiplicity of Christianities in
American culture. Certainly, the juxtaposition of traditional church histories has long
suggested that there are people with very different beliefs about the nature of God (e.g.,
Trinitarian, Unitarian). These believers have remarkably different styles of worship:
mainline services organized around contemplative liturgies, mega-churches offering
concert-like showmanship, and working-class congregations where the power of scripture
and classic hymns might be punctuated by dance and other forms of embodied worship.
There are even different versions of the Christian sacred text: the Catholic Bible, multiple
translations of the Protestant Bible (King James Version, New International Version,
Revised Standard Version, Message, to name a few), and the even Apocrypha. Despite
these differences, scholars of American religion have been reluctant to explicitly argue
125 Dwight Swartz, Culture and Power The Sociology of Pierre Bourdieu (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago, 1997), 9.
68 that what Christians believe about the social significance of the faith is largely
determined by their investment in maintaining or improving their social identities—in
particular, as those identities pertain to race, gender, class, and sexuality.
The following chapter examines the founding of the Universal Fellowship of
Metropolitan Community Churches as part of a faith-based strategy to advance gay
rights. When Reverend Troy Perry founded UFMCC in 1968, it was the first church
devoted to the spiritual needs of gays and lesbians and he became an example for the
growing number of Christian lesbians and gays who began to publicly announce that their
sexuality and faith were not in conflict. They testified that God not only loved them but
had created them, including their sexual identity, in the image of God. Their path from
dissonance to reconciliation became a social strategy to combat faith-based homophobia and to change dominant Christian discourse on sexuality from condemnation to affirmation. Like activists in the civil rights movement for racial equality, gay Christians drew on the cultural imprimatur of Christianity to expose the immorality of bigotry and the political hypocrisy inherent in state-sanctioned violence and discrimination. Unlike civil rights activists, however, lesbian and gay Christians were able to point to antiblack racism to render homophobia intelligible as a spiritual and moral wrong. Moreover, the civil rights movement was so deftly woven into America’s progress narrative that many people imagined antiblack racism as a dark part of the nation’s otherwise exceptional past.126 Thus, by analogizing homophobia and antiblack racism, gay Christians told their
126 Dominant histories of the United States are narratives of human progress that recuperate state violence, or what scholar Amy Kaplan termed the “violence of empire” in the myth of American exceptionalism. Kaplan defined American exceptionalism as “a teleological narrative of inevitability, that America is the apotheosis of history, the embodiment of universal values of human rights, liberal-ism, and democracy. […] In this logic, the United States claims the authority to ‘make sovereign judgments on what is right and what is wrong’ for everyone else and ‘to exempt itself with an absolutely clear conscience from the rules
69 heterosexual siblings in Christ that Americans would eventually, but inevitably, jettison anti-homosexual animus as but one more anachronistic prejudice.
that it proclaims and applies.’” Amy Kaplan, “Violent Belongings and the Question of Empire Today: Presidential Address to the American Studies Association,” American Quarterly 56, no. 1 (March 2004), 1– 18.
70 Chapter 2: “We’re Not Afraid Anymore”: Reverend Troy Perry, the Universal Fellowship of Metropolitan Community Churches, and the Origins of LGBT Christian Conversion
And yet the same revolutionary beliefs for which our forebears fought are still at issue around the globe—the belief that the rights of man come not from the generosity of the state but from the hand of God. —President John F. Kennedy127
Your heart cried out when, after almost four hundred years, you saw [that] water hoses, cattle prongs and dogs were used on black men, women and children. . . . But what of the homosexuals? Did you weep when one was beaten to death by the police in Los Angeles? —Reverend Troy Perry, The Lord is My Shepherd and He Knows I’m Gay128
In the 1972 autobiography The Lord is My Shepherd and He Knows I’m Gay,
Reverend Troy D. Perry issued the charge above in an open letter to white congregations.
Perry was a white gay man who first found his voice in the Pentecostal churches while
growing up in Florida and Georgia in the 1950s. As founder of the Universal Fellowship
of Metropolitan Community Churches (UFMCC), the first gay-affirming Christian
denomination, Perry accused them of moral hypocrisy because they supported civil rights
for African Americans but opposed civil rights for homosexuals. By asking why
homosexuals had not received the same level of compassion and concern as African
Americans, he also accused those churches of a longer history of LGBT oppression: “For
two thousand years I have watched you try to destroy my brothers and sisters. . . . They
were stoned, they were cast asunder, were tempted, were slain with the sword. . . . You
have watched as we were placed on the rack, thrown to the flames, banished from the
127 John F. Kennedy, “Inaugural Address: January 20, 1961,” Journal of Public Law 12 (1963), 235; Bellah, “Civil Religion in America,” 1–21. 128 Troy Perry and Charles L. Lucas, The Lord is My Shepherd and He Knows I’m Gay, 3rd ed. (Austin, TX: Liberty, 1987), 198–199.
71 midst of society, and you have never said a word.”129
Perry contrasted “four hundred years” of antiblack racism with “two thousand years” of antigay oppression. In so doing, he revealed the cultural logic of the post-civil- rights era that America’s history of racism rendered LGBT suffering intelligible. Perry also grounded his denunciation of anti-homosexual bias in the spiritual authority he bore as a minister of the gospel. In some ways, doing so echoed the oratory of black civil rights preachers and the social justice gospel model typified by the civil rights leadership and activism of Reverend Frederick L. Shuttlesworth and, more famously, Reverend Dr.
Martin Luther King, Jr. Spiritual authority has political significance because notions of divine will figure prominently in American civil religion, as indicated in the statement of
President John F. Kennedy above.
Although ostensibly nondenominational, such references to God tap into a shared spiritual and moral culture of the Nation. For example, Reverend Shuttlesworth’s faith in divine justice authorized the righteous indignation apparent in his biblical critiques of the racism and greed he saw at work in American empire: “Can we discern any difference in today's Birmingham and yesterday's Babylon? . . . Babylon became mad and was destroyed. Alabama and Birmingham have become drunk off the wine of the Southern
Way of life, and have become mad with power. Not willing to sober themselves with the vitality of Twentieth Century light, they persist in 1860 standards.”130 Here,
Shuttlesworth used the Bible and, more directly, the cultural intelligibility of Christianity
129 Ibid. 130 Reverend Fred L. Shuttlesworth, “Call for Reason…,” in Rhetoric, Religion and the Civil Rights Movement, 1954–1965, Volume 2, ed. D. W. Houck & D. E. Dixon (Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2006), 465–66.
72 to condemn white racism. He denounced white supremacists and their more passive
conspirators as the true threats to American democracy by comparing the condition of the
United States to Babylon, an empire whose great military and economic might had been
used to benefit the few, oppress the masses, and enslave the Israelites.131 Shuttlesworth,
like other advocates of black civil rights, rejected scriptural interpretations that white
supremacist Christians used to justify antiblack racism.132 Similarly, gay Christians
challenged those who interpreted the Bible to condemn homosexuality. The late Pastor
Larry J. Uhrig wrote in 1986 that antigay Christians had conveniently overlooked the
context of two of the most explicit “covenant relationships” in scripture were between
people of the same sex. Uhrig charged that the Church with “offer[ing] our society not a
sexual ethic but a procreation ethic” that resulted in ineffectual and impoverished
conceptions of human sexuality.133 “Divorce rates, premarital and extramarital sex, and
abortion are facts that clearly demonstrate how bankrupt our procreation-based sexual
ethic really is.”134 As Perry and Uhrig and others in this chapter will demonstrate, LGBT
Christians positioned themselves in relation to the racial and religious idioms circulating at the end of the twentieth century in order to make their demand for social equality intelligible to people within and beyond their faith tradition.
The chapter begins by examining ways that Perry’s evangelical Pentecostal
background prepared him to start a Christian ministry for lesbians and gays. The next
131 Book of Genesis. The Book of Revelation refers to “Babylon, the great, the mother of harlots.” Revelation, 17:3–8. Bible, KJV. 132 Passages that discuss the treatment of slaves were interpreted as evidence that the institution was ordained by God (e.g., Deuteronomy 15:12–15; Ephesians 6:9; Colossians 4:1; and entire book of Philemon). 133 Larry J. Uhrig, Sex Positive: A Gay Contribution to Sexual and Spiritual Union (Boston, MA: Alyson Publications, 1986), 17–18, 22. 134 Ibid.
73 section examines the social context of faith-based activism by Metropolitan Community
Church (MCC) from 1969–1979. In November of 1969, Perry’s Metropolitan
Community Church held its first major demonstration: a rally and a march to denounce antigay violence and to challenge California laws regarding sex between consenting adults. By October of 1979, MCC had become a national church and Perry spoke at the first March on Washington for Gay and Lesbian Rights. A standoff between Perry and an
African American conservative Pentecostal minister highlighted important national debates over shifting conceptions of race and sexual identity. The chapter concludes that
LGBT Christianity is an important example of the social gospel explored in the previous chapter. It exemplifies not only the Christian dimensions of American politics—what
sociologist Robert Bellah termed “civil religion”135—but that Christianity provides a
framework for ordinary Americans to grapple with contentious social issues.
This chapter relies on two theories to understand this shift: intersectionality and
disidentification. Intersectionality and disidentification are useful for understanding how
LGBT Christians used their faith to reject homophobia and see homosexuality as simply
another expression of human diversity, no less than any other. This chapter builds on
theories of intersectionality by studying how LGBT Christians transformed spiritual and
emotional injury resulting from faith-based homophobia. People achieved religious
intelligibility—that is, the language and practices by which Christian activists become intelligible within contemporary social and political discourse—by assessing core
identities to determine which were more or less stigmatized. This was an intersectional
analysis in that it underscored the “multidimensionality of marginalized subjects’ lived
135 Bellah, “Civil Religion in America.”
74 experiences.”136 Intersectionality has, by and large, excluded religion as a category. Its
inclusion is a unique offering by Faith’s Queer Pleasures. Black feminist scholar
Jennifer C. Nash notes that intersectionality is useful for the way “it subverts race/gender
binaries” and “provide[s] a vocabulary to respond to critiques of identity politics.”137 In
this project, it offers a model for thinking beyond the gay/Christian binary in that it
equips LGBT Christians to articulate the inextricability of spirituality from other
identities. Critiques of the theory have to be addressed, however. Categories themselves
are limiting because they often elide the heterogeneity within them. Further, merely
adding additional new categories of identity—as in adding religion to sex, race, and
gender identity—tends to shore up rather than disrupt reliance on categories.138 Nash
argues that intersectionality sets Black women up as the ultimate example of oppression
and fails to account for the concurrence of identitarian benefits and deficits because of its
focus on “what Loïc Wacquant terms the “‘logic of the trial,’ a scholarly tradition of
locating practices that injure multiply marginalized subjects.”139 The emergence of
LGBT Christianity provides a case study for thinking beyond this limitation by
understanding race, gender, sexuality, and religion as mutually constitutive categories of
identity. Without question, each category is incomplete and laden with histories of
oppression. Still, the calculus by which gay and lesbian Christians reclaimed their faith as
a strategy to combat faith-based homophobia is an opportunity to think about “the ways
136 Kimberlé Crenshaw, Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Legal Forum, 1989), 139. 137 Nash, “Rethinking Intersectionality,” 2. 138 Here Nash is engaging Leslie McCall’s essay on the difficulty of operationalizing intersectionality. Nash, “Rethinking Intersectionality”; McCall, “The Complexity of Intersectionality,” 1771–800. 139 Nash, “Rethinking Intersectionality,” 13.
75 in which subjects might take pleasure in some of the trappings of patriarchal [or Christian
hegemonic or heteronormative] power in particular social, cultural, historical, and
political moments.”140
Evangelical Christianity’s emphasis on individual experiences of renewal and rebirth—and in particular the recuperation of sin and separation from God as the condition by which redemption becomes possible—suggests that beyond assessing the
marginal status of specific aspects of their identity, LGBT Christians created an affirming
identity by refusing to choose either faith or sexuality. More directly, they surveyed
different identities, determined which had more or less social capital and decided to draw
on those with more social power to build up those with less social power. Importantly,
they neither rejected nor fully complied with conservative Christianity’s condemnation of
homosexuality. Instead, Troy Perry and MCC represent the pleasure of self-making and
community-building as they created a new and affirming way of being Christian. LGBT
Christianity, therefore, is a disidentificatory project in that these believers understood the
intersection of LGBT and Christian identities as a site of possibility instead of despair.
Antigay violence, as a result, was perceived as a sign that LGBT people constitute an
unjustly oppressed minority. This transformation of cultural logic buttressed their
demands for equal rights. Further, inasmuch as the black civil rights struggle constituted
a partial disruption of the logic of white supremacist Christianity—such as the logic at
work in the minds of the bombers of 16th Street Baptist Church—the performance of
Christian LGBT identity had the potential to call into question the logic of evangelical
Christian heteropatriarchy.
140 Ibid., 12.
76 Like contests between pro– and anti–civil rights Christians regarding issues of
antiblack racism, debates between gay-affirming and nonaffirming Christians prove that religion remained a powerful indicator of how Americans participated in late twentieth-
century American politics. In the words of George Marsden, an American religious
historian, “Religion, especially in combination with ethnicity, has been the best predictor
of political behavior throughout most of the history of the United States.”141 While
Marsden’s observation was based on nineteenth-century American religion, this chapter demonstrates the continuing inextricability of religion and politics. The chapter argues that the late twentieth-century African American civil rights movement established an important relationship between religion and citizenship in the American imaginary:
American citizens used religion to undergird political demands with moral authority, to distinguish anomalous and merely unfortunate incidents from those that represent a violation of the moral order and therefore a serious threat to the future of the Nation.
Openly gay Episcopal priest Father Malcolm Boyd was inspired to fight homophobic violence and discrimination after he witnessed the racialization of injustice through the spectacularity of the African American civil rights movement. In a 1985 interview of him and Reverend Perry, Boyd linked the African American civil rights struggle of the 1960s with the history of American Christianity and the contemporary fight for gay rights. He recalled “that the American Book and Bible Society once published The Negro a Beast142”and noted that he had been arrested “dozens of times in
141 George M. Marsden, “Afterword: Religion, Politics, and the Search for an American Consensus,” in Religion and American Politics, ed. Mark Noll (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), 459. 142 Charles Carroll, The Negro a Beast, or “In the Image of God” (St. Louis, MS: American Bible and Book House, 1900), accessed June 20, 2012: http://archive.org/stream/thenegrobeastori00carrrich#page/n3/mode/2up.
77 the civil rights movement.”143 Adding that the church had also failed to condemn
America’s military presence in Vietnam, Boyd asserted that Christians had often been on
the wrong side of justice regarding race and war and that the same could be said of
Christian condemnation of homosexuality. Here, Boyd made the fight for gay rights intelligible as yet another instance in which Americans protested their exclusion from all the rights and privileges of citizenship. Most importantly, this is also the story of his own conversion: witnessing the antiblack racism of the church and participating in its disruption convinced him and others that homosexual abjection could be similarly fought.
Boyd eschewed internalized homophobia and delighted in positioning himself and his allies in right relationship to social justice.
For Perry, the journey to a gay-affirming faith involved reclaiming his ministerial authority: “In 1968, when I founded Metropolitan Community Church, I decided that my days of waiting [for affirmation from the traditional church] were over.” In so doing, he reinterpreted the meaning of the antigay oppression:
I think gay men and lesbians have a certain sensitivity because of the oppression they’ve suffered. [. . .] Without sounding like an elitist—and it’s hard for me not to—I must say that I don’t encounter the sensitivity I’ve talked about from the majority of heterosexuals. Whatever causes the sensitivity so many gays have— whether it’s due to oppression from society or whether it’s something inherent in the gay spirit—I believe it’s a gift from God. In our new television documentary, “God, Gays and the Gospel,” I say upfront, “Homosexuality is a gift from God.” And I believe that with all my heart.144
Perry made it clear that the oppression of gays is wrong. Yet, he also argued that gays
and lesbians were uniquely gifted by God to be sensitive people, who were often drawn
143 Malcolm Boyd and Troy Perry, “Two Gay Clergymen Speak about Ecstasy, Sex and Spirituality,” The Advocate (April 2, 1985). James Tinney Papers, Moorland Spingarn Archives, Howard University. 144 Ibid.
78 to professions such as healthcare, teaching, and ministry, which allowed them to use their gift of sensitivity help others. In the early days of his ministry, Perry often took pains to explain and denounce homophobic violence and discrimination, as in the opening quotation. By 1985, he could also celebrate homosexuality as a gift from God and he no longer explicitly relied on comparing antigay and antiblack oppression. Further, he reinterpreted the slur of “sensitivity” sometimes ascribed to emotionally expressive gay men as a strength and source of compassion, exhibiting a maturation of the Christian
Identity politics studied here.
The chapter examines the “spiritual coming out” story of Reverend Troy Perry and his subsequent activism. The faith-based gay rights activism of Perry and other ministers stands as evidence that the intersection of Christian and sexual identities empowered LGBT Christians to denounce bar raids, false arrests, and police beatings as moral wrongs. Although most churches continued to preach that homosexuality was an abomination, LGBT Christians created new churches and parachurch organizations from
1968 to 1979. They testified that gays and lesbians were equally made in the image of
God, using the profession and performance of evangelical Christian belief to shift dominant heteronormative Christian discourse.
In American Christianity, conversion most often refers to the moment when someone feels contrite for past wrongs, professes belief in Jesus Christ, and commits to living according the tenets of the Bible. Also known as “winning souls,” Christian conversion according to William James is “the process, gradual or sudden, by which a self hitherto divided and consciously wrong, inferior and unhappy, becomes unified and consciously right, superior and happy, in consequence of its firmer hold upon religious
79 realities. This at least is what conversion signifies in general terms, whether or not we
believe that direct divine operation is needed to bring such a moral change about.”145
Based on the New Testament command to “teach all nations,” the conversion of
nonbelievers to faith in Jesus Christ is the focus and foundation of evangelical
Christianity. Conversion equipped LGBT Christians to counter Christian bigotry and
demand political equality. In the 1970s MCC churches proselytized in gay bars, testifying
of Christ’s love for homosexuals to those who had come to relax or party there. Because
most who joined UFMCC and Christian affinity groups were already Christian, witness
and conversion for LGBT people of faith entailed coming to believe that their sexuality
did not separate them from the love of God.
At the same time, many gays and lesbians resented the harm caused by Christian
homophobia. As Reverend Dr. Mona West of the Cathedral of Hope in Dallas, Texas, the
largest LGBT-affirming congregation, explained, “As gay and lesbian Christians, we are
kind of in this catch-22 situation in terms of the way the Religious Right responds to us
but also the ways in which non-Christian folks from our community respond to us.”146
Most studies of late twentieth-century religion have not examined LGBT sexuality within
or arising from conservative evangelical Christianity. As a result, few scholars have been
able to explain why religion inspired LGBT activists as much as members of the
Religious Right in the years following the tumult of the 1960s.
Scholars of late twentieth-century American Christian culture, such as Nancy
145 Emphasis added. William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature (New York: Longmans, Green, 1916). Originally published in 1902. 146 Quoted in Heather Hendershot, “Holiness Codes and Holy Homosexuals: Interpreting Gay and Lesbian Christian Subculture,” Camera Obscura 15, no. 3 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001), 151.
80 Ammerman and Jon Shields, have produced important scholarship on the rise of
conservative faith-based political activists, popularly known as the Religious Right.147
Such scholarship often resists analysis of the strategic deployment of Christian Identity.
Instead, scholars default to explication of the sincere practice and performance of
Christian Identity with little attention to the way those aspects are informed by
investment in the maintenance of gender and racial inequality, both of which have been
explicitly religious projects. That is to say, Christianity in the public sphere always has an
agenda and its utility in shifting public discourse persists because it provides a way to
make one’s concerns legible within existing religious discourse.148 Perry and LGBT
Christian groups within major denominations are therefore an under-examined part of the
Christian dimension of American politics.
Progressive Christians have advanced a variety of perspectives on sexuality. First, the presumption that all Christians have always perceived homosexuality as a uniquely condemnatory sin has been proven false by LGBT scholars. John Boswell’s Christianity,
Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality, argued that until the twelfth century the Roman
Catholic Church had no special concern or condemnation of homosexuality and in some cases actually celebrated love between men.149 Heather White’s Reforming Sodom:
Protestants and the Rise of Gay Rights traces antigay Christianity to liberal Protestants’
incorporation of psychiatry and psychotherapy into Christian teaching in the 1920s.150
White chronicles gay rights advocacy among liberal Protestants in the 1960s as well as
147 Ammerman, Bible Believers; Shields, The Democratic Virtues of the Christian Right. 148 Fessenden, Culture and Redemption, 4. 149 John Boswell, Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1980). 150 White, Reforming Sodom.
81 the Religious Right’s adoption of “therapeutic orthodoxy’s legacy” in the 1970s in order to establish heterosexuality as God’s plan since the creation of humankind. As this project demonstrates, by the late 1960s gay and lesbian Christians began advocating for their right to worship openly and in community with other Christians. They called attention to the fact that the civil religious rhetoric contains implicit claims about which people deserve equal rights, which do not, and the moral norms that underpin those claims.
LGBT Christians illustrate not only the potential social and political significance of Christian conversion but also that the violence and discrimination experienced by one minority made it possible for another’s suffering to become more intelligible.
Overwhelmingly white and male, early LGBT Christian leaders drew on contemporary racial politics to critique unfair treatment of homosexuals. Through the language and spectacle of American antiblack racism, white LGBT Christians began to understand their experiences of stigmatization and even violence to be constitutive of a new minority identity.
“God Has His Hands on This Boy”: The Origins of Perry’s Affirming Faith
Born July 20, 1940, in Tallahassee, Florida, Perry described “church [as] an extended family, with social warmth, emotion and a strong spiritual magnetism.”151 The oldest of five boys, Troy Perry was a natural leader. Even though his parents were not religious, he eagerly attended First Pentecostal Holiness Church, where the young Perry began to hone the skills that came to define his leadership in the faith-based part of the
151 Perry and Lucas, The Lord is My Shepherd, 40
82 gay liberation movement. He won prizes for memorizing passages of scripture—a skill
that equipped him to respond with confidence to Christians who believed that the Bible
condemned all homosexuality. Perry’s brother Jim recalled that Perry was always the
preacher when the children played church; he would find bugs for Perry to eulogize.152
Being recognized for memorizing scripture at church and playing the role of preacher
among peers provided Perry with more than a sense of personal accomplishment,
however. He was learning how to speak in public, how to use textual authority to shore
up an argument, and that a skillful speaker had the power to evoke powerful reactions in
listeners.
Perry also became a leader in his home after his father was killed in a car crash.
When his mother remarried, the stepfather drank away the family’s money and forbade
the children from attending church. Perry took it upon himself to try to shield his mother
and siblings from his stepfather’s physical abuse. When Perry was twelve years old, a
merchant marine whom the stepfather had invited to stay at the house raped Perry. As a
result of the loss of his birth father and the violence he experienced thereafter, Perry ran
away from home to live with relatives in southern Georgia.153 It was there that he gained
clarity on his lifelong passion for preaching when Aunt Bea, a close family friend,
prophesied of Perry’s ministerial future.154 Perhaps Aunt Bea is the best example of the
way Perry learned that Christian belief could transform identity and subjectivity.
Aunt Bea’s conversion had come in 1939 when she attended the fifth week of
152 Reverend Troy Perry, Call Me Troy, DVD directed by Scott Bloom (San Francisco, CA: Frameline, 2007). 153 Perry and Lucas, The Lord is My Shepherd, 30. 154 Perry and Swicegood, Don’t Be Afraid Anymore, 2. See also, Perry and Lucas, The Lord is My Shepherd, 40.
83 revival led by a Reverend Rowan. Rowan was a start-up preacher who “had been called out of the cotton fields to carry [God’s] word to a ‘dying world.’”155 The narrative of his
transition from lowly cotton picker to anointed preacher spoke to Aunt Bea, who then
translated her presalvation reputation as “the town whore” into a testimony of God’s
saving power. As a result of being “seized with the Holy Ghost,” she began a month-long
fast, during which she responded only in tongues when addressed. Her husband, fearing
for her health, had her committed to a mental hospital where she “healed” some of the
other patients. The fast and the incessant glossolalia ended when she received heat
therapy: Aunt Bea stood naked in a closed cell as hot air was forced into it. Standing in
her own urine to keep her feet from blistering, she again spoke English. Her husband
became a convert and Aunt Bea became the first pastor of the new Pentecostal Church in
town.
In Pentecostal styles of worship, the transformation of personal narrative occurs in
multiple ways, including prayer, glossolalia, dancing in the spirit, being slain in the spirit,
and prophecy. In each instance, God’s personal involvement in the lives of Christians is
communicated to the worshipper through verbal and embodied transcendence. During a
moment of prayer at the end of service, Aunt Bea called church members to gather
around the altar and began to lay hands on them. When she reached him, the thirteen-
year-old Perry felt the spirit as she shared a revelation from God: “I felt her hands press like a crown upon my head. She started speaking in tongues. Her body shook violently. I
stared awestruck up at her, and she looked down at me. [. . .] She looked out at the
congregation and her hands came around and cupped my face. [. . .] She smiled and told
155 Perry and Lucas, The Lord is My Shepherd, 34–36.
84 them that God had his hands on me, and that He was going to use me mightily in His
ministry. She swore to them, and to me, that I had been called to God[:] ‘God has His
hands on this boy.’”156 Aunt Bea added that Perry “was called to reveal and preach the
Will of God.”157 Such moments confirm Pentecostals’ belief that the Holy Ghost, or Holy
Spirit, endowed them with power to apprehend spiritual truths inaccessible to
nonbelievers. It also equipped them to reimagine the conditions of their lives in the
context of divine will.
Aunt Bea’s prophecy of Perry’s divine gift translated the pain of his past into a
narrative arc that gave even more meaning to his journey to affirming Christian ministry.
Scholars such as Ann Burlein have focused on how the Religious Right used the Bible to
justify narrow attitudes on race, sexuality, and gender, yet Perry’s religious trajectory
suggests the usefulness of Christian belief for those seeking personal transformation.158
Social stigma can be reinterpreted in the context of Christianity. Christian conversion
transformed Aunt Bea in the eyes of her community. As Aunt Bea became a moral
leader, the stigma of being regarded as the “town whore” was transformed into evidence
of God’s redeeming power. What Aunt Bea and Perry understood as the transformative
power of God is simultaneously the power of the language of faith to redeem otherwise
stigmatized histories in Christian culture.
While Perry respected his relatives, there were aspects of the faith of his family
that he did not embrace. “Pentecostalism” is a general term that elides difference among
156 Ibid., 40–41. 157 Ibid. 158 Ann Burlein, Lift High the Cross: Where White Supremacy and the Christian Right Converge (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002).
85 those who so identify. One relative whose brand of faith Perry found objectionable was
his Aunt Lizzie from Lenox, Georgia, who affirmed Perry’s spiritual gifts. Aunt Lizzie
was also a prominent snake-handling Pentecostal preacher. Snake-handling preachers
base their practice on the following passage in the New Testament: “And these signs shall
follow them that believe; In my name shall they cast out devils; they shall speak with new
tongues; They shall take up serpents; and if they drink any deadly thing it shall not hurt
them; they shall lay hands on the sick, and they shall recover.”159 On their reading,
holding snakes was a requirement for entrance into heaven and a sign of one’s piety.160
Surviving a bite was a sign that that one was right with God. Perry recalled that his aunt
and two men were bitten by snakes during service at a neighboring church. One of the
men, a pastor, waited for paramedics while his “arm swelled to the elbow,” and the other,
a farmer, died. Although Aunt Lizzy recovered in full, Perry was not convinced that he
should follow her example: “I’m frightened by four kinds of snakes […] Big snakes, little
snakes, live snakes, and dead snakes. If I have to pick one up to get into heaven, then
more than likely I’m going to go the other way—for I will never, never handle a
snake!”161
Here Perry worked to distance himself from snake-handling Christians and, more
importantly, the kind of cultural recidivism and anti-intellectualism imputed to working- class and working-poor Pentecostals. In addition, Pentecostalism equipped Perry to understand diversity among Christians and to see this diversity as a means by which to
159 Some snake handlers are also inspired by this passage to drink strychnine or other poisons during worship. The vast majority of Christians do neither. Mark 16:18, King James Bible. 160 Perry and Swicegood, Don’t Be Afraid Anymore, 10. 161 Ibid.
86 expand, rather than undermine, Christian belief. He also called attention to his family’s
Pentecostal lineage: some were Free Holiness Pentecostals who traveled from farm to farm holding meetings in members’ homes, some were part of “the ‘established’
Pentecostal group, the Church of God”—in which he was later ordained—and still others such as Aunt Lizzy were snake-handling Pentecostals.162
Of course, speaking in tongues, dancing in the spirit, and surviving being bitten by poisonous snakes are marginal to dominant narratives of religious experiences in the history of American Christianity, but they are important for understanding how Perry came to believe that his sexuality did not preclude being what evangelicals might call “in right relationship with the Lord.” First, Perry knew from witnessing his family’s various styles of worship that there was more than one way to be a Pentecostal. Christian heterogeneity was evident because some attended roving Free Holiness meetings, while others felt compelled to handle snakes, yet all were devout believers. Therefore, Perry realized that people may emphasize different passages of the same Bible, or even arrive at incongruous interpretations. Moreover, such incongruity suggests that the meaning of scripture might be gleaned from the confluence of culture and history.
The meaning of sexual behavior might also differ by context. However,
“homosexual” was not a word that was spoken from the pulpit of the Church of God in which Perry grew up. In his generation, people did not view homosexuality as a unique identity “but as a heterosexual doing something bad. A queer was different . . . that was a sissy . . . I knew I wasn’t a sissy.”163 This distinction enabled Perry to see himself as
162 Ibid, 8–10. 163 Perry, Call Me Troy.
87 different from those identified as “queers.” Still, Pentecostals believed that all sins could be forgiven and he began a ritual of asking God for forgiveness after each homosexual encounter. Yet, as Perry’s desire for same-sex sexual intimacy persisted, so too did his desire to preach. He believed his Christian and sexual identities developed concurrently because his first consensual same-sex experiences were with other boys during the same period in which he won awards for memorizing Bible verses and church doctrine. He had almost won his denomination’s highest award for youth when he was sixteen, but was denied by the state overseer because another boy admitted that he, Perry, and other boys had engaged in sexual experimentation during summer camp that year.
Sexual encounters with men ended temporarily when he fell in love and married
Pearl Pinion, a pastor’s daughter who was respected for her work in the church. He was under the impression that ordination was only available to married preachers, so marrying
Pearl also made sense professionally, and he said, “[a]t that point, I felt that I was successfully suppressing my homosexuality. I didn’t want to be a ‘queer’ whatever that was.”164 Affairs with men continued nonetheless and threatened to end his ministry. In
1961, Perry was a minister in Florida and also worked outside the church to support his family. One day he came home to find his mother and wife looking forlorn. They had read a letter sent by the overseer that described allegations made by a man with whom he had an affair. Perry admitted to his wife and mother that the allegations were true, but he ultimately decided to remain with Pearl and their son. Still, he was excommunicated from the Church of God.
He was ousted from churches around Tallahassee and in Chicago as lovers who
164 Perry and Lucas, The Lord is My Shepherd, 56.
88 wanted more than Perry could offer exposed their encounters. Perry was able to start over
in a new denomination, however, and he and Pearl had another son. The family
eventually moved to Santa Ana, California, where he was appointed pastor of a Church of
God of Prophecy. It was in a Santa Ana bookstore that, for the first time, Perry saw
copies of a gay magazine, Physique. He worked up the courage to purchase every book
about homosexuality in the store. Two of them Perry described as life-changing: One,
“published by the oldest Homophile organization,” the cover of which described it as a magazine written from “the homosexual viewpoint,” and Donald Webster Cory’s The
Homosexual in America: A Subjective Approach.165 Those books assured Perry that his
sexual desires were not unique and that he was not alone: “It was as though God had sent
me those books.”166
Eventually Perry was “outed” again after a sexual encounter with a marine from a nearby base. Perry was then summoned to appear before the congregation where he had to admit that he had “failed God.” After the meeting, as Perry prepared to tell Pearl, she
said she had found the books on homosexuality hidden beneath the mattress. He told her
he believed he was a homosexual, eventually drove her and their two sons to the airport,
and did not see the children again for seventeen years.
Troy Perry was drafted to serve in the United States Army after his family left.
The nation was in turmoil over civil rights for African Americans; the war in Vietnam;
and riots in resource-poor urban neighborhoods, including Watts in Los Angeles. It was
in this context, during his two-year stint in the United States Army, that Perry began
165 Donald Webster Cory was a pseudonym for Edward Sagarin. Donald Webster Cory, The Homosexual in America: A Subjective Approach (Whitefish, MT: Literary Licensing, LLC, 1951). 166 Perry and Lucas, The Lord is My Shepherd, 70–71.
89 living as an openly gay man but he was no longer affiliated with any church. Reverend
Perry served in the United States Army from the fall of 1965 until he was honorably
discharged in October 1967. Upon returning to Los Angeles, however, he soon answered
God’s call again.
“We’re Not Afraid Anymore!”: UFMCC and the Origins of LGBT Christian Activism
Popular histories of the modern gay rights movement highlight the Stonewall
Riots in New York City in June of 1969.167 These histories celebrate the night that LGBT
people fought back against police harassment and, like most gay rights histories, give
little attention to the spiritual lives of those involved. Nevertheless, the importance of
faith to segments of the gay community is suggested by the fact that the first service of
Metropolitan Community Church occurred almost one year earlier. On October 6, 1968,
at 1:30pm, Reverend Troy Perry held MCC’s first service in his Huntington Park,
California, living room. Twelve people responded to the ad he had placed in the
Advocate, a local gay paper. That moment marked the beginning of a national faith-based
movement for gay rights. He quickly became a vocal gay liberation activist who led
marches and challenged city officials to end institutional homophobia. As pastor of MCC
and moderator of the Universal Fellowship of Metropolitan Community Churches, the
denomination he founded in 1971, Perry joined the roster of Southern-born ministers who brought the intersection of faith and politics to the national stage at the end of the twentieth century.
167 David Carter, Stonewall: The Riots that Sparked the Gay Revolution New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2004); Martin B. Duberman, Stonewall (New York: Dutton, 1993).
90 Evangelical Christianity’s emphasis on personal relationship with God equipped
Perry to articulate a Christian vision of gay liberation to the growing number of
congregants each week. As word of “the church for homosexuals” spread in local and
national media, Perry drew on his background as a Pentecostal pastor to shepherd the
young church.168 Perry had been a preacher in the Church of God and Church of God of
Prophecy, both conservative Pentecostal denominations, since his teens. As a result, his
understanding of God’s favor upon gays and lesbians did not come from modernist
biblical criticism but immediate communication with God. As Susan Harding suggests,
“Bible-based language is the medium and the ritual practice through which born-again
Christians are formed and reformed.”169 This is congruent with work by Marie Griffith,
Nancy Ammerman, and others who stress that conservative evangelicals exercise some
flexibility when interpreting scripture literally.170 Perry could still appeal to biblical
authority because he was participating in a generative reading of the text. In the words of
Harding: “The interpretive tradition is literalist in the sense that it presumes the Bible to
be true and literally God’s word, but the interpretive practices themselves are not simply
literalist. The biblical text is considered fixed and inerrant and it means what god
intended it to mean, but discerning that meaning is not simple or sure or constant. […]
The Bible is at once a closed canon and an open book, still alive, a living Word.
Preachers and their peoples are third testaments, the authors of always unfolding chapters
and verses.”171 This living relationship between God, believer, and text is what enabled
168 John Dart, “A Church for Homosexuals,” Los Angeles Times (December 8, 1969), c1. 169 Harding, The Book of Jerry Falwell, x. 170 Griffith, God’s Daughters, 66. Also see Harding, The Book of Jerry Falwell and Ammerman, Bible Believers. 171 Harding, The Book of Jerry Falwell, 28.
91 Perry to hear God’s voice. He could then preach a biblical message that was conservative
in terms of its Christo-centricity, but contextual in its interpretation of the so-called
“clobber passages” of the Bible that many believers read as evidence of divine
condemnation of same-sex behavior.
The Metropolitan Community Church soon became a spiritual and social resource
for the Los Angeles homosexual community and Perry preached a three-part Gospel: salvation, community, and Christian social action. Salvation, Perry preached, was promised in John 3:16: “for God so loved the world that God sent Jesus to tell us that whosoever believes shall not perish but have everlasting life”; and “‘whoever’ included me as a gay male, unconditionally, because salvation is free—no church can take it
away.”172 Community referred to the church’s intention to be “a family” to those who
were lonely or had been ostracized because of their sexual identity. Lastly, he preached
that MCC’s commitment to Christian social action compelled them to fight for “all of our rights, secular and religious[.]”173 Published in 1972, Reverend Perry’s The Lord is My
Shepherd and He Knows I’m Gay is the locus classicus of Christian coming-out narratives for the way it shows how personal faith produces the Christian dimension of the public sphere. More directly, The Lord is My Shepherd and He Knows I’m Gay was the gay rights movement’s entrée into the long history of American Christian activism: from the abolition of slavery to the temperance movement, from anti-Vietnam War protests to the struggle to secure civil rights for African Americans, Americans have
172 Troy Perry quoted in John Gallagher, “Is God Gay?” Advocate Magazine (December 13, 1994), 43. Also see Perry and Swicegood, Don’t Be Afraid Anymore. 173 Troy Perry quoted in Gallagher, “Is God Gay?” 43. Also see Reverend Perry and Swicegood, Don’t Be Afraid Anymore.
92 envisioned social change and social justice through the moral and spiritual lessons
learned in places of worship.
The Los Angeles church was an amalgam of Christian denominations and styles
of worship because most members were not Pentecostal. Indeed, the twelve people who
attended the first service in Perry’s Huntington, California, living room in 1968 claimed
backgrounds in Roman Catholicism and various Protestant denominations. Although
Pentecostals typically dressed up for church, pulpit attire was less formal than that in
Episcopal or Catholic churches and vestments were not normally worn. Perry said that he
“went out and bought full pulpit attire” to help members from such “high-church” traditions relate to him as their pastor, indicating sensitivity to class difference between those from high- and working-class Christian traditions.174
Early in the history of MCC, Perry realized that certain aspects of his Pentecostal
origins—in particular, its literal interpretation of scripture—were incompatible with the
multidenominational, multicultural population he hoped to serve. “I knew that I was not
starting another Pentecostal church. I was starting a church that would be truly
ecumenical. [I found out that the first twelve to attend MCC] were Catholic, Episcopal,
and various Protestant sects.”175 Therefore, beyond the sexual orientation of the majority
of its membership, MCC differed from mainstream churches in practice and ritual.
Most mainstream congregations began Sunday services at 10:00 or 11:00 in the
morning. By contrast, the initial services of MCC were held in the afternoon, perhaps to
accommodate the schedules of those who worked at night, but also to make it possible for
174 Perry and Lucas. The Lord is My Shepherd, 126. 175 Ibid.
93 gays who spent Saturday nights in nightclubs and bars to attend. Perry also served Open
Communion that first Sunday and it is now a weekly ritual in all UFMCC congregations.
Within mainstream Christian congregations, the Communion ritual is a meaningful
expression of faith. In many Protestant denominations, it also expresses belief in one’s
“spiritual worthiness” to partake in what is called “the Lord’s Supper.”176 Therefore, the
offering of Communion to gays communicates a belief in their acceptance to God, just as
receiving Communion demonstrates confidence in being accepted by God. Perry recalled
that they incorporated aspects of “worship from the Episcopal, Presbyterian and Lutheran
churches as well as those that members of the congregation wanted” and that “what
emerged was a straight line of well organized ritual that allows for improvisation or
change.”177 In less than ten years, LGBT Christians began MCC congregations in nearly
every major city, including Denver, Dallas, Washington, DC, and New York. Still, the
mix of Christian cultures within a single service was striking, as a journalist reporting on
the 1974 General Assembly observed: “Tambourines were beaten, song-leader Willie
Smith leaped and ran about in a white Elvis Presley suit, the preaching was frenetic and
the politics were hot. Those who preferred material more accessible to the intellect had to
wait until the final session, when the distinguished Anglican theologian, Dr. Norman
Pittenger, talked on sexuality and love.”178
The “hot politics” of the time referred to a number of major changes. MCC-
Denver had left the Fellowship because they felt Perry was too political. The year before,
176 Belief that one must be worthy to take communion is based on 1 Corinthians 11:27, which is attributed to the Apostle Paul, whom Perry said “disapproved of gay men and lesbians” but “was completely in favor of slavery.” Perry and Swicegood, Don’t Be Afraid Anymore, 40. 177 Perry and Lucas, The Lord is My Shepherd, 130. 178 “Gay Christians: Questions Haunt MCC Convention,” News West 1, no. 7 (August 21, 1975), 1.
94 Freda Smith had led a charge to make all denominational literature gender-neutral when
referencing God. There were also ongoing debates over the different worship styles the
Fellowship housed. MCC’s Reverend Robert Sirico attempted to explain why some in
MCC were inclined toward more expressive, namely charismatic and Pentecostal,
expressions styles of worship. He reminded readers in an article in The Gay Christian, an
MCC publication, that the denomination was “the only major church our community has”
and pointed out that following the customs of one denomination would necessarily lead
to the alienation of those from other denominations. As a result, he argued, “We must go
about our work as Christians, with a unitive (sic) variety, being diverse yet one.”179
Working together in spite of internal differences was necessary because antigay violence was a threat to the entire community.
The Civic Center Rally in Los Angeles, November 16, 1969
On March 9, 1969, gay men who frequented the Dover Hotel watched helplessly
as Officers Lemuel Chauncey and Richard Halligan of the Los Angeles Police
Department (LAPD) brutally beat an unarmed and unresisting gay man. The Dover Hotel
catered to gay men seeking a safe place to meet each other for sexual encounters. Howard
Efland, like most of the Dover’s patrons, had signed in under a pseudonym.180 Believed
179 Emphasis in original. Robert A. Sirico, “Twentieth Century Pentecost,” The Gay Christian: A Journal of Metropolitan Community Church 1 (1974), 14–15. 180 Lillian Faderman and Stuart Timmons, Gay L.A.: A History of Sexual Outlaws, Power Politics, and Lipstick Lesbians (Cambridge, MA: Basic Books, 2006), 161; Tom Swicegood, Our God Too: Biography of a Church and a Temple (New York: iUniverse, Inc., 2003), 138–44. Similar accounts of Efland’s murder are found in the following: Joseph R. Williams, “‘I Don't Like Gays, Okay?’ Use of the ‘Gay Panic’ Murder Defense in Modern American Courtrooms: The Ultimate Miscarriage of Justice, Albany Law Review 78, no. 3 (June 29, 2015), 1129; Connell O’Donovan, “‘The Abominable and Detestable Crime Against Nature’: A Brief History of Homosexuality and Mormonism, 1840-1980,” in Multiply and Replenish, Essays on Mormon Sex and Family, ed. Brent Corcoran (Salt Lake City, UT: Signature Books,
95 to have been about 5’5” and about 145 pounds, Efland was a nurse who had signed in as
J. McCann. Patrons and other bystanders provided sworn testimonies that the vice-
officers held Efland on the ground as they punched and kicked him while he screamed in
agony, “Help me! My God—someone help me!” They reported that the officers threw
Efland’s body into the back of a police vehicle. Once his legal name was determined, the
LAPD told the young man’s parents that he had died of a heart attack rather than admit
that they had beaten him. The coroner determined that his death had been caused by a
massive hemorrhage from a ruptured pancreas.
Although the medical examiner ruled the death an “excusable homicide,” the gay community, including Reverend Perry, remained convinced that Officers Chauncey and
Halligan had murdered Efland. The officers were never charged. It was within this context that Metropolitan Community Church’s Committee for Homosexual Law Reform organized a rally against the California laws that made such abuses legal. The laws targeted prohibited sexual acts by consenting adults. At the time, gays risked their jobs and their families and even their lives by coming out. Members of the recently formed
Committee for Homosexual Law Reform organized a rally in protest.
The Committee was organized by Robert “Bob” Ennis, a handsome gay man who
stood over six feet tall and was one of the first African Americans to join the
Metropolitan Community Church. Ennis had established a successful career as a dancer
and female impersonator. Therefore, when he heard about Reverend Troy Perry’s
ministry to homosexuals he could afford to fly from his home in Arizona to hear Perry
1994); Michael Newton, Hate Crime in America, 1968–2013: A Chronology of Offenses, Legislation and Related Events (Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company, 2014).
96 preach in California. Moved by Perry’s prophetic call for the end of violence and
discrimination against homosexuals, Ennis moved to California to join the Metropolitan
Community Church and quickly appointed himself church secretary, public relations
manager, and first editor of the MCC publication, In Unity. He even brought his own
electric typewriter. “You can’t afford me,” he informed Perry, “but I’ll work for you as a
volunteer until you can pay me.”181
Ennis was Perry’s secretary when MCC began the Committee for Homosexual
Law Reform to challenge laws that criminalized consensual sex between adults, and
Ennis introduced Reverend Perry as the main speaker on November 16, 1969. Standing
before the crowd of gay rights activists and allies at the downtown Los Angeles civic
center, Ennis confessed that “not too long ago” he had acquired enough backbone to
march for his rights. Alluding to the black civil rights movement, he said that the success
of that movement led him to understand that despite centuries of antiblack racism,
African Americans were indeed represented in the preamble to the United States
Constitution. “We are the people,” he told the crowd, and when their applause subsided
he explicitly linked the black civil rights movement with the nascent faith-based movement for gay rights: “I’ve had the privilege of knowing two great men in my life.
One was Dr. Martin Luther King and the other is one I’m serving much closer: Ladies and gentlemen, my boss and my Pastor, Reverend Troy Perry.”182 Interestingly, it isn’t clear that Ennis actually knew or marched with Dr. King. In fact, when a black musician
181 http://www.revtroyperry.org/photoAlbum/1969BobEnnis/1969BobEnnis.htm. Also see, White, Reforming Sodom, 155. 182 David Joe Robinson, “The Rhetoric of Troy Perry: A Case Study of the Los Angeles Gay Rights Rally” (Ph.D. diss., University of Southern California, 1972), 240–46.
97 invited him to march in the Poor People’s Campaign, Ennis replied, “I couldn’t possibly.
I don’t have anything poor to wear!”183 After the assassination of Dr. King in April of
1968, Ennis could not remain so flippant. He began to identify with the movements for civil rights and gay rights. Standing on the podium to introduce Perry, Ennis symbolized the progress of racial justice and MCC’s commitment to equality for all simply by being black in a predominantly white congregation. The sense of grief and loss shared by many
Americans following the assassination of Dr. King and Senator Robert Kennedy inspired
Ennis to join MCC and to commit to the modern social justice movement on behalf of sexual minorities to impact the United States. Ennis’s shifting perspective on faith-based
social justice, from indifference to commitment, exemplifies efforts to make the fight for
gay equality legible via the language and imagery of the time, in this case the iconicity of
King and the cultural intelligibility of Christian resistance to antiblack racism.
Before leading a march to the steps of the State Capitol on November 16, 1969,
Perry assured the crowd gathered at the Los Angeles Civic Center that God not only
loved them but was on their side in the fight for equal rights:
I want you to look around and be proud today. You don’t have to be afraid of anybody. You don’t have to take the back seat on the bus anymore. When you see those individuals who’ve been stared at, and called “queer,” and “faggot,” ashamed all their life, you can look at them and say, “Don’t worry, our day is coming.” We’re not afraid anymore. . . . And I’ll tell you, I think of the Bible scripture—and I have to preach because I’m a preacher—that tells me, “If God be for us, who can be against us?” 184
Perry was careful to remind the crowd that he was a preacher not only because many in
the crowd may never have heard of MCC, but because Perry was also claiming that the
183 Robinson, “The Rhetoric of Troy Perry,” 128–29; White, Reforming Sodom, 155; Swicegood, Our God Too, 190–91. 184 Robinson, “The Rhetoric of Troy Perry,” 240–46.
98 fight to end violence and discrimination against homosexuals was a righteous movement
inspired by God. Perry invoked the image of Rosa Parks’s protest against segregation to
make anti-homosexual oppression legible through an analogy with antiblack racism. He
was also positioning himself and MCC in the same Christian protest tradition as Martin
Luther King, Jr., and the many churches where activists met and mobilized communities
during the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s. Perry also drew on his
background as a Southern Pentecostal preacher in the Church of God denomination.
Pentecostals are largely poor and working-class Americans who exist on the margins of
American evangelicalism. As Michael Warner, a former Pentecostal and now-queer atheist, explained “fundamentalists have contributed to the culture of minority identities
. . . by developing the performative genres of identity-talk” such that “the same language of necessity, shame and pride, stigma and cultural change” can be found in both conservative Christian and secular gay rights rhetoric.185 Thus, drawing on the zeitgeist
of social reform and, in particular, the recent black civil rights struggle, Perry combined
the power of coming out as gay with his Pentecostal background of righteous indignation.
He articulated gay liberation as a spiritual as well as political battle. It is from this intersection that Reverend Perry officially began the faith-based arm of the larger gay rights movement.
Perry drew on the United States’ tradition of religious freedom to support gay liberation. In 1977, for example, Perry announced: “I am directed by God not to eat anymore until I raise a hundred thousand dollars to begin the fight against Senator
185 Warner, “Tongues Untied, 230.
99 Briggs.”186 He had followed the success of Anita Bryant’s campaign in Dade County,
Florida (which repealed an ordinance banning discrimination based on sexual orientation)
and was further motivated by his belief that he had been a victim of a “witch hunt” while
in Florida. In 1961, the Florida Legislative Investigation Committee, commonly called
the Johns Committee, was devoted to quashing gay rights activism and exposing gays and
lesbians. Perry believed his ministry in Florida had been destroyed by the climate the
Johns Committee created: “Many people were being exposed, and having their lives
ruined. Some left. Some killed themselves. Even if nothing was proven, just being
accused was enough.”187 Consequently, when Senator John Briggs initiated Proposition 6
to deny gays and lesbians the right to work in California’s public schools, Perry led the
fight to defeat it by mobilizing gays, employing the services of campaign consultants, and
openly debating proponents of the initiative. But the money required to do these things
was raised by Perry’s fast, which he ended after sixteen days when $100,000 in donations
had been received.188
The spiritual conflict and exile experienced in sexually conservative
denominations gave rise to a new political identity at the intersection of civil and lived
religion. For Perry, Christianity was sincere worship and civic engagement, therefore
“the shared domain of the sacred” was the genesis of LGBT Christian identity.189 In the
summer of 1971, Perry led members of MCC on a week-long march from San Francisco,
186 Perry and Swicegood, Don’t Be Afraid Anymore, 150. 187 Perry and Lucas, The Lord is My Shepherd, 63–66. 188 In 1970, Perry fasted for ten days on the steps of the Federal Building to bring attention to gay rights (Perry and Swicegood, Don’t Be Afraid Anymore, 175–76). Also, see Melissa Wilcox, “Of Markets and Missions: The Early History of the Universal Fellowship of Metropolitan Community Churches,” Religion and American Culture 11, no. 1, (2001) 90. 189 Robert Orsi, Between Heaven and Earth: The Religious Worlds People Make and the Scholars Who Study Them (Princeton: Princeton University, 2005), 182.
100 California, to the steps of the State Capitol in Sacramento. The march was intended to
garner support for Assembly Bill 489, known as the Consenting Adults Bill. Originally
introduced in 1969 by African American Assemblyman and gay rights ally Willie Brown,
the bill legalized sexual acts by consenting adults. Two years later, Orange County,
California, Assemblymen Reverend E. Richard Barnes, Frank Lanterman, and Robert H.
Burke, and other conservative Republican members of the California House of
Representatives liberally invoked scripture to oppose the bill on Christian grounds. Burke
argued that support of the bill was tantamount to “elevating ourselves above God.”190
Burke and his conservative cohort defeated the bill by using a combination of antigay
stereotypes and cherry-picked Bible passages.
In response, Rodger Harrison, pastor of MCC-Costa Mesa and associate professor
of Social Ecology at the University of California at Irvine, countered Harrison’s claims.
Before coming out as gay in 1970, Harrison had been a minister in the American Baptist
Convention (ABC).191 He first learned about Troy Perry while in Russia, where Harrison
served ABC from 1967–69. In 1970, Harrison returned to the United States, whereupon
he became the sixth clergyperson to join MCC after Perry authorized him to start a
church in Orange County. As a result of his extensive background in ABC and education
at ABC’s Berkeley Baptist Divinity School, Harrison was confident of his Christian
authority. When Assemblyman Burke continued to use the story of Sodom and Gomorrah
190 Lester Kinsolving, “Sacramento Assembly Quarrels about Religion,” The Free Lance-Star, November 29, 1971. 191 According to the September 28, 2007, statement he prepared for the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Religious Archives, Rev. Dr. Rodger D. Harrison was born in 1922. He was married to Mary Angela Gomez Botella until her death February 11, 1958. For discussion of his petition to the American Baptist Convention to accept MCC-Costa Mesa on a dual alignment basis, see Enroth and Jamison, The Gay Church, 93–94.
101 to oppose gay rights, Reverend Harrison offered that he also condemned the rape at the
center of the narrative. Where Burke interpreted writings attributed to Apostle Paul in the
New Testament book of Romans as evidence of the sinfulness of homosexuality,
however, Harrison countered that Paul was actually condemning the sexual depravity of
people who had forsaken their relationship with God for sexual hedonism. Harrison
testified of a redeemed homosexual identity not represented by the Bible’s writers: “The
Apostle [Paul] is not talking about a gay couple in Huntington Beach, California who are
faithful to each other, who hold good jobs, pay their taxes, attend Church regularly and
vote.”192
Antigay Christians invoked the Bible in order to prove their own moral authority through knowledge of scripture. Therefore, by demonstrating knowledge of scripture,
Harrison disrupted the gay/Christian binary upon which Burke relied. Having established
the inapplicability of the Romans passage to committed gay couples, Harrison then
pointed to those aspects of scripture that Burke’s hyper-focus on same-sex behavior
occluded. Harrison noted that although the Apostle provided a catalogue of sins in 1
Corinthians 6:9–19, Burke had curiously absolved those who are “greedy, robbers,
adulterers, drunkards or thieves.” Moreover, Harrison noted that Orange County had had
more divorces than marriages among heterosexuals the previous year and chided that
Burke “should be grateful for a few gay couples who are faithful to each other and
responsible members of society.”193 Where Burke argued that maintaining the illegality
of same-sex behavior was necessary to prevent national disaster, Harrison drew parallels
192 Roger Harrison, “Open Letter to Assemblyman Robert H. Burke,” in In Unity, UFMCC (June 1971), 24, 30. 193 Ibid.
102 between changing racial norms. Burke’s thinking, Harrison argued, was simply another
unjust anachronism, a form of bigotry keeping the United States from achieving its
highest ideals of equality and justice: “Your [article] sounds strangely like the railings of
a ‘Redneck’ against the Blacks 15 years ago: prejudice, emotion, Bible.”194 As Perry and
supporters stood on the steps of the Capitol a rainbow-colored halo seemed to surround the sun, prompting Assemblyman Brown to point the crowd’s attention to the sky: “it seems the Man upstairs is trying to tell us something.” Despite the witness of queer
Christians such as Perry and Harrison and their allies, the bill was defeated by a margin of 2–1 when it first reached the Assembly floor in 1971. When, after three years and ten months, the bill passed in the California Senate, on May 2, 1975, and was signed into law by Governor Jerry Brown ten days later, Reverend Perry proclaimed through tears,
“Praise the Lord!”195
LGBT Christian Conversion: Faith in Race and Sexuality
Evangelical Christians experience a number of conversions over the course of a
lifetime. The most skillful preachers use language to effect a spiritual crisis wherein the
listener comes to see relationship with God as the remedy to emotional distress and the
beginning of a life of peace and joy. Evangelicals believe that Heaven rejoices when even
one person is saved, so the moment of repentance is climactic whether it results from
street-corner witnessing or the pulpit preaching, the conversion of nonbelievers is the
focus and foundation of evangelical Christianity. In a 1982 speech at Parliament
194 Editorial, In Unity, UFMCC (1971), 24. 195 George Skelton and Jerry Gillam, “Assembly Kills Softer 'Pot' Law, Passes Sex Bill,” Los Angeles Times (May 9, 1975); Douglas Sarif, “Consenting Adults Bill Passes,” Gay News Alliance (1975).
103 Cathedral in Moscow, Reverend Graham described three conversions in his life: acceptance of Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior, racial justice, and nuclear disarmament.196
The Christian believer evolves, he suggested, even as the foundation of the faith—Jesus
Christ as savior—remains the same. As examined in chapter 1, Graham preached that relationship with Christ would cause people to reject hatred and bigotry for others.
Unfortunately, he often conflated the outrage black people felt in response to racist violence with racism itself. This tendency is one example that religion must always be interrogated in social and historical context.
Many LGBT Christians came to understand homosexuality as an identity based on a shared history of oppression. Perry’s challenge to churches attempted to draw a connection between African American civil rights and gay and lesbian equality by interpolating homophobic violence within more familiar histories of violence:
“Sometimes you still weep for the American Indians, for the Mexican Americans and for the lonely child-soldiers . . . on both sides that are dying in a dirty little war in Vietnam.
But what of the homosexuals? Did you weep when one was beaten to death by the police in Los Angeles?”197 Perry and other activists in the post-civil rights era often found it expedient to articulate homophobia through the oppression of racialized “others.”
Important also is that the post-civil rights era, or what the late Manning Marable called
“the second reconstruction,” is a period in which many Americans believed that the series of legislative victories against institutional forms of antiblack racism from the 1950s through the 1960s marked the end of social inequality. It is therefore not surprising that
196 Grant Wacker, America’s Pastor: Billy Graham and Shaping of a Nation (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University, 2014), 130. 197 Perry and Lucas, The Lord is My Shepherd, 198–99.
104 secular gay activists such as Paul Goodman and Christian activists including Perry, the
controversial Unitarian Reverend James Stoll, and Father Malcolm Boyd made
homophobia legible through the trope of antiblack violence and crafted a language of gay
equality from the rhetoric of racial equality.
Despite the strategic value of such comparisons, some black activists resisted
them. White gay activist Paul Goodman recalled that Stokely Carmichael of SNCC and
the Black Panther Party bristled when “Allen Ginsberg and I once pointed out how we
were niggers[.]”198 According to Goodman, Carmichael “blandly put his foot down by
saying we could always conceal our disposition and pass. That is, he accorded us the
same lack of imagination that one accords to niggers; we did not really exist for him.”199
Similarly, Reverend James Stoll, defrocked Unitarian minister and accused
pederast, articulated gay and all minoritarian identities through the trope of “the nigger”
when he wrote: “No homosexual gets much joy out of making love because he’s been
told by reliable sources that he’s sick, weird, and all those other words that we know.
God, do I know them. Maybe you now have some sense of what it means to hear the
word ‘Nigger’ and know that means you. Now, maybe you’d better learn that there are many different groups of ‘Niggers’ in the country . . . Mexican Americans, poor people,
women and yes, homosexuals.”200 Again, the rhetoric of race and rights provided
language that made the abject status of gay Americans intelligible. “Nigger” here is
shorthand for the abject, such that Goodman made sense of the “arbitrary brutality” he
198 Paul Goodman. “The Politics of Being Queer,” in Come Out Fighting: A Century of Essential Writing on Gay and Lesbian Liberation, ed. Chris Bull (New York: Thunder’s Mouth Press/Nation Books, 2001), 80. 199 Ibid. 200 Oppenheimer, Knocking on Heaven’s Door, 35.
105 and other gays suffered by reasoning “[i]n essential ways, my homosexual needs have
made me a nigger.”201 Nearly a decade later, gay African American activist and politician
Mel Boozer told the 1980 Democratic National Convention that there was no qualitative
distinction in being called “nigger” or “faggot.”202 The equation of racial and sexual
abjection, however necessary, flattened the particularities of both. Those particularities
were especially pronounced in the context of faith-based activism.
Conclusion
Perry’s articulation of his conversion from conflicted gay Christian to openly gay
pastor was informed by experiences of antigay discrimination, the intelligibility of
antiblack and anti-Semitic violence, and righteous indignation over being stigmatized and
perhaps racialized. “Isn’t the persecution of homosexuals—and I want to end with this—
like the persecution of the blacks in the South when, by virtue of the color of your skin
you were a potential rapist and, therefore, you were not to have certain jobs, not to live
in a certain area of town; you couldn’t marry, you couldn’t go to certain schools because
of that? Doesn’t it put those [antigay] individuals in the same class with Adolf Eichmann,
who had the real plan for taking care of the Jewish problem in Germany, just by
exterminating them, destroying them?”203 Here, Perry constructs a queer political subject
through faith-based denunciations of homophobic violence and discrimination. Warning
201 Goodman, “The Politics of Being Queer,” 80. 202 Melvin Boozer was vice-presidential candidate on Senator Ted Kennedy’s failed coup against Jimmy Carter at the Democratic National Convention. Leigh W. Rutledge, The Gay Decades: From Stonewall To the Present: The People and Events That Shaped Gay Lives (New York: Plume, 1992), 156. See also, Randy Shilts, And the Band Played On: Politics, People, and the AIDS Epidemic (New York: St. Martin’s Griffin, 1987), 32. 203 Perry and Lucas, The Lord is My Shepherd, 198–99.
106 the board that antigay discrimination had the potential to push someone remembered as
“the best teacher in this school” to suicide, Perry linked homophobia and antiblack racism
in order to interpellate the queer subject within existing political discourse.204 As a result,
his analysis of ongoing segregation and discrimination was impoverished. He therefore
failed to appreciate the ways that white supremacy and heteronormativity morph in the
face of challenge but rarely disappear.
Hoping to realize what Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. described as “the
beloved community,” LGBT Christians fought faith-based homophobia as Dr. King had fought faith-based racism.205 First, LGBT Christians believed in the power of Christianity
to disrupt racist discourse. Second, the Christian underpinnings of the rhetoric of
American ideals facilitated a Christian construction of citizenship. Examples are found in
the Declaration of Independence and at the height of the civil rights movement were
central in President Kennedy’s 1961 inaugural address, as quoted in the epigraph of this
chapter206 LGBT Christian activists invoked the nation’s history of antiblack racism in
order to render homophobia intelligible and to advance recognition of LGBT Americans
within the beloved community, and the transcendent language in American civil religious
rhetoric imbued the faith of evangelical queer Christians with political significance.207
204 Ibid. 205 Martin Luther King Jr., stated, “The way of violence leads to bitterness in the survivors and brutality in the destroyers. But the way of nonviolence leads to redemption and the creation of the beloved community.” Clayborne Carson, ed., The Autobiography of Martin Luther King, Jr. (New York: Grand Central Publishing, 2001). Here, I also draw on Nicole Fleetwood’s use of the term “iconicity” to say that King’s image has come to represent the historical period known as the civil rights era including its successes and failings. Nicole R. Fleetwood, Troubling Vision: Performance, Visuality, and Blackness (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011). 206 Kennedy, “Inaugural Address,” 235; Bellah, “Civil Religion in America,” 1–21. 207 Drawing on the work of Rousseau, Robert Bellah’s 1969 essay examined President John F. Kennedy’s 1961 Inaugural Address to establish civil religion.
107 This belief caused them to understand Christian identity as a condition for establishing gay subjectivity. I therefore argue that the gospel of gay liberation was predicated on the cultural intelligibility of antiblack violence, conflation of Christian belief and civil religion, and prophetic interpretations of the hard-won end of legal segregation.
Lastly, the prominence of people of faith in advancing black civil rights coupled with the implicitly Christian rhetoric of civil religion caused individuals such as Perry to imagine that embracing one’s Christian and sexual identities was a kind of conversion. It even promised a new life, one no longer compartmentalized by secrets and shame. In all,
Perry sought to convince churches that had supported the black civil rights movement that gays and lesbians equally deserved God’s love and civil rights.
The following chapter examines a unique project to achieve such belonging through the creation of a new identity. Dr. James Tinney, a friend of UFMCC and scholar of black religion and culture, provides insight into the kinds of identitarian transformations that became conceivable at the intersection of race, religion, and sexuality.
108 Chapter 3: Race, Faith, and Sexuality in James Tinney’s Christian Identity Politics
I hesitate to say that I am white. Biologically I would be classified as an Anglo- Saxon, but in terms of a frame of reference, a state of mind, I more readily identify with Negroes. I more readily share in a “black mentality.” – James S. Tinney, 1969208
I am Black. I am gay. I am Pentecostal. – James S. Tinney, 1983209
James Tinney created a new life as a black, gay Pentecostal scholar and pastor in the fourteen years between writing the essays cited above. The purpose of this chapter is not to prove Tinney’s racial identity. Rather, the chapter is based on my research, which includes a review of James Tinney’s own writing and conversations with those who were his close friends in Washington, DC.210 Until his marriage to Darlene Wood ended in
1968, Tinney had identified as a white, married, heterosexual high school teacher and a
Pentecostal lay minister in Kansas City, Missouri. Born James Steven Tinney in Kansas
City, Missouri, on May 12, 1942, Tinney’s Christian Identity remained constant throughout his life. He preached his first revival at fourteen years old, was ordained at the
208 James. S. Tinney, “A Unit on Black Literature,” The English Journal 58, no. 7 (1969). 209 This essay appears to be the first time Tinney claimed, in writing, to have a black grandmother and to have been ostracized as a black person with light skin. James. S. Tinney, “Struggles of a Black Pentecostal,” in Black Men, White Men: A Gay Anthology, ed. Michael J. Smith (San Francisco, CA: Gay Sunshine, 1983). 210 To a person, they said he was a white man who identified as black for personal and political reasons. According to Assistant Pastor Isaiah Poole, Tinney explicitly said he was white as he was dying of AIDS in 1988. Indeed, the end of the quote that opens this chapter suggests the same: “. . . And it is important for every white English teacher who would teach Negro Literature to aspire to a similar state.” Kevin Mumford and I disagree about Tinney’s racial identity, as indicated in Mumford’s recent project, which celebrates Tinney as a black gay man. Mumford and I spoke briefly after my presentation on Tinney and Troy Perry as part of the Whose Beloved Community? Black Civil and LGBT Rights Movements conference held at Emory University in March 2014; Kevin Mumford, Not Straight, Not White: Black Gay Men from the March on Washington to the AIDS Crisis (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Press, 2016).
109 age of eighteen, and added academic study to his gift for oratory by taking classes at
Nazarene Theological Seminary in Kansas City. After separating from his church and
family, he made sense of his experience of excommunication by identifying as a black
person. He moved into a black neighborhood with a black roommate, joined a black
Pentecostal church, and began working at a historically black newspaper. In 1973, he
moved to Washington, DC, to begin graduate work and spent the next fifteen years living
as a black gay man who was also a person of deep faith.
In the previous chapter, Reverend Troy Perry’s early ministry deployed a new
Christian Identity politics by making antigay violence and discrimination legible through
comparison to black oppression. Tinney, also a Pentecostal, shifted from identifying with
black people’s struggle for equal rights to identifying as a black gay man. This chapter
focuses on the last two decades of Tinney’s life in order to understand how the
intersection of race, religion, and sexuality inspired him to translate his experience of
faith-based homophobia into righteous indignation and a new identity. At the intersection
of his biological whiteness, political blackness, and Pentecostalism, Tinney provides a
unique example of explicit and implicit assumptions about the power of black Christian
Identity to effect social change in the post-civil-rights era. The chapter analyzes the biographical details of Tinney’s life through scholarship on identity and religion. This chapter argues that, in the wake of the black civil rights movement, Americans such as
James Tinney had a new conception of identity: people could change how and with whom they identified, and such changes—as when Tinney identified with the masses of black Americans—could open pathways to understanding and belonging that difference and inequality once foreclosed.
110 In 1978, Tinney earned a doctorate in political science from Howard University
for his dissertation, A Theoretical and Historical Comparison of Black Political and
Religious Movements. Tinney was a prolific journalist and speechwriter for
Representative John Conyers Jr. of Michigan and Samuel C. Jackson, undersecretary of
the Department of Housing and Urban Development during the Nixon Administration.
He was also an editor at the Baltimore Afro-American.211 In 1979, he came out publicly
at the Third World Lesbian and Gay Conference, which followed the first March on
Washington for Gay and Lesbian Rights. In 1982, he organized a three-day revival for
gays and lesbians and founded the Pentecostal Coalition for Human Rights.212 He
subsequently became the founding pastor of Faith Temple Church, a black, gay-affirming
Pentecostal congregation. On June 12, 1988, Tinney died of acquired immune deficiency
syndrome at the age of forty-six at Howard University Hospital in Washington, DC. At
the time of his death, he was a tenured professor of journalism at Howard University. His
identity as a Pentecostal remained constant amid the significant political changes
throughout his life.
The following section examines Tinney’s journey from identification with black
people to claiming ontological blackness through the historical context of his identity
project in the decade before he moved from Kansas City to Washington, DC, and
compares it with similar, though nonreligious, identity projects carried out by white
Americans. It also shows that Black Power and black liberation theology provided the
211 Pat Press, “Historic Letters to an Editor: Close to Home,” Washington Post, February 24, 1985. 212 “In August Pentecostal preacher and professor Dr. James Tinney, who publicly announced his homosexuality in 1979, was excommunicated from the Church of God in Christ on the eve of his citywide revival meeting for gays in Washington (114).” “Religion: Homosexuals in the Churches,” Newsweek, October 11, 1982, 113–114.
111 political and Christian foundation for his new life. The next section explores religion,
identity politics, and conversion by placing Tinney’s project within the wider context of
LGBT Christian Identity politics and in conversation with scholarship on identity and
authenticity. Next, the resistance and rejection Tinney faced from within the black
community—as well as similar experiences articulated by black LGBT Christians—
challenged his conceptions of black consciousness and community. The chapter
concludes that Tinney’s identity project is best understood as a unique attempt to launch a
black church movement in support of lesbians and gays. The end of the King era of civil
rights and the rise of the Black Power movement coincided with a shift from essentialist
to postmodern constructions of identity. In some ways this shift made his identity project possible, but it also highlighted internal struggles for representation and power and thereby disrupted the very notion of the black community. Tinney’s project is studied here because it is a useful example of the complex racial dynamics at work in post-civil- rights era Christian Identity politics.
From Identification to Identity
The focus on Blackness does not mean that only Blacks suffer as victims in a racist society, but that Blackness is an ontological symbol and a visible reality which best describes what oppression means in America. —James Cone 213
Until the gay-affirming ministry of Reverend Troy Perry began in 1968, there was
little evidence to challenge the common perception that Pentecostals were socially
213 James H. Cone, A Black Theology of Liberation, 20th anniversary ed. (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1998), 7.
112 conservative Christians who believed homosexual desire, behavior, and identity were
sinful. While it is unclear whether James Tinney was aware of the first services of
Metropolitan Community Church, that was the same year that he began to give up his life
as a heterosexual, married man. After months of pastoral counseling, Tinney was
unexpectedly delivered from his belief that homosexuality was a sin. He had been active
in Youth for Christ (YFC), an evangelical organization that held pro-Christian rallies
throughout the United States to recruit young people to the Christian faith.214 Tinney,
then a married lay minister in his twenties, took young people from his church to YFC
rallies, often leading late-night discussions with them afterward. It was the frequency of
such late nights that caused his wife Darlene to suspect him of having an affair with
another woman. She summoned the pastor of their Pentecostal church to their home the
night Tinney admitted that he was having an affair with one of the other young men in
the group.215 At a church service not long thereafter, the pastor called Tinney to stand in
front of their congregation and began to pray over him fervently, asking God to exorcise
“the demons of lust, homosexuality and perversion.”216 Tinney anticipated a violent
spiritual experience that might include writhing on the floor, spewing vomit, and
speaking in a voice not his own as “the demons” resisted expulsion. Instead, “nothing
happened.”217 No longer conflicted about his attraction to men, his peculiar and
214 Youth for Christ began in the 1940s and its first evangelist was Reverend Billy Graham. For more on Graham’s outreach ministry and focus on young people, see: Carpenter, Revive Us Again; Dochuk, From Bible Belt to Sun Belt; Williams, God’s Own Party. 215 Church “youth groups” included young people in their mid-teens as well as those in their twenties. As of this writing, there is no evidence that the person with whom Tinney was involved or his subsequent partners were underage. 216 Neil Miller, In Search of Gay America: Women and Men in a Time of Change (New York: Harper and Row, 1989), 247. 217 Ibid.
113 anticlimactic deliverance from spiritual dissonance was incongruent with the teachings of
his faith community. While he acknowledged that his infidelity was wrong, he also
realized that his sexuality was not demonic and that nothing had taken place in church to
change it.218 Darlene told their daughters, then four and five years old, that their father
was possessed, and he lost contact with his children and church.219
Like Perry, Tinney drew on the spirituality associated with the black civil rights
movement to imagine his own liberation. National turmoil and international conflict
defined 1968, the same year that James Tinney began to imagine a new identity for
himself. The United States escalated military action in Vietnam. Americans watched Dr.
King’s campaign against economic and health disparity; his assassination; and the
resulting chaos, during which cities, including Chicago, Los Angeles, and Washington,
DC, burned. Tinney witnessed the 1968 riots in Kansas City, Missouri, when police
attacked and killed five blacks.220 Also that year, police in Berkeley brutalized antiwar
protesters. Gold and bronze medalists Tommie Smith and John Carlos raised their fists in
a Black Power salute during the Summer Olympics medal ceremony. Americans were
once again shaken when news anchors reported the assassination of presidential
candidate Senator Robert Kennedy. In July, the United States boasted a manned mission
to the moon. That October, Reverend Perry founded Metropolitan Community
218 Ibid. 219 Darlene (Wood) and Tinney’s daughters, Jeanne Marie and Stephanie JoAnne Tinney, delivered some of his books and articles to Howard University’s Moorland-Spingarn Library after he died, which suggests that they re-established contact prior to his passing. He was survived also by his mother Mary Compton. Joseph D. Whitaker, “James Tinney, Howard U. Professor, Dies,” Washington Post, June 15, 1988. 220 “Rioting in City Takes Five Lives: Violence Erupts for the Second Night on the East Side as Snipers Battle Police and National Guardsmen—The Dead are Negroes,” Kansas City Star, April 9, 1968, 1.
114 Churches.221 In December, American astronauts read the creation story found in the book
of Genesis from space—an endorsement of Christianity that reinforced religion as a
spiritual constant amid the political and technological changes the nation witnessed that
year.
Overly confident in the prophetic Christianity that had driven antiwar and
antiracist social movements of the past two decades, Tinney imagined an explicitly
racialized Christian challenge to the political triumvirate of homophobia, classism, and
racism: “My idea: The black church of the ghetto, the storefront, the sanctified, is the
genius of the human race. It is the most scriptural, apostolic form of truth known to
man.”222 Tinney’s identity project draws on Christian community-making through conversion, such that sincere belief constitutes both membership and new identity. At the same time, his project is illustrative of a moment in American history, the post-King era,
when identifying with black people, or even as black, could serve as a marker of
progressive politics and rejection of the presumed anachronicity of overt antiblack
racism.
Tinney found refuge in black churches and a language of resistance to his own experience of oppression in the Black Power movement. He was particularly struck by the promise of cross-racial unity against state oppression in the following admonition from the Black Panthers’ Chairman Bobby Seale: “You must move against domestic imperialism, growing rampant, FASCISM—right here in America, before you can end
221 As explained in chapter 2, the group began as the Metropolitan Community Church in Perry’s Huntington, California, living room in 1968. The denomination was formally established in 1971. 222 Handwritten note in James Tinney Papers, Burgundy Folder, Box 5, n.d., Moorland-Spingarn, Howard University Archives.
115 the war in Vietnam or all forms of aggressive wars like that against other people abroad.
Black, Brown, Red and other peoples in America and poor people, even poor White
people, are corralled in wretched ghettos, especially those people of color and Black
people whose communities are occupied in the fashion they are and murdered.”223 Seale imagined a community among the disfranchised that had the potential to disrupt inequality and injustice in the United States and abroad. Tinney was attuned to the rise of what was then termed “black consciousness” among black youth because of the high school where he taught English. After Martin Luther King Jr.’s murder, Tinney boasted that he was the first teacher in the Kansas City public schools to open his classroom for
Black Panther visits. By the time he began graduate school in 1973, Tinney could explain his identification more clearly: “Biologically, I would be classified as white, I suppose; however, I identify more readily with Blacks. In fact, using blackness as an ontological symbol, I not only choose to be Black, I [am] precisely that.”224 Here Tinney called
attention to the element of choice in racial identification.
James Tinney’s project highlights the shift some scholars have made between ontological and postmodern blackness. Tinney’s construction of a black Pentecostal identity demonstrates what Christian ethicist Victor Anderson identified as the “close
connection between ontological blackness and religion. Ontological blackness signifies
the totality of black experience, the binding together of black life and experience. In its
223 Tinney underlined this section. Bobby Seale, “Message to All Progressive Forces,” in The Black Panther: Black Community News Service III, no. 29 (1969), 11. The newspaper was published by the Black Panther Party, Ministry of Information, James Tinney Papers, Moorland-Spingarn, Howard University Archives. 224 This document was written while Tinney lived at Benton Boulevard in Kansas City, Missouri. James S. Tinney, “Black Christian Theology,” Burgundy Binder, Box 5, James Tinney Papers, Moorland-Spingarn, Howard University Archives.
116 root, religio, religion denotes tying together, fastening behind, and binding together.”225
In other words, both terms point to the reification of race through “categorical,
essentialist and representational languages depicting black [religious] life and
experience.”226 According to bell hooks, postmodern blackness rejects universalizing and
fixed conceptions of black identity. Responding at the time to critics of identity politics,
hooks noted that the postmodern critique of identity was a means by which those
upholding the “pervasive politic of white supremacy […] prevent the formation of radical
black subjectivity[.]”227 Identity remained important “[f]or African-Americans [because]
our collective condition prior to the advent of postmodernism and perhaps more tragically
expressed under current postmodern conditions has been and is characterized by
continued displacement, profound alienation and despair. […] When black folks critique
essentialism, we are empowered to recognize multiple experiences of black identity that
are the lived conditions which make diverse cultural productions possible.”228 In many
ways, Tinney’s identity project initially relied on “ontological blackness,” while his
subsequent scholarship on black Pentecostalism and political movements indicated a
growing awareness of the diversity of the black community.
Tinney’s project drew heavily from the racial progress narrative of the post-civil-
rights era. The term “racial progress narrative” refers to a set of assumptions about black
identity and history that were circulating after the passage of civil rights legislation.
These assumptions posit that passage of civil rights legislation marked the end of the
225 Victor Anderson, Beyond Ontological Blackness: An Essay on African American Religious and Cultural Criticism (New York, NY: Continuum, 1995), 14. 226 Ibid, 11. 227 bell hooks, “Postmodern Blackness,” Postmodern Culture 1, no. 1 (September 1990). http://www.africa.upenn.edu/Articles_Gen/Postmodern_Blackness_18270.html. Accessed March 12, 2011. 228 Ibid.
117 direst effects of racism, such that any subsequent reference to other kinds of injustice is
made legible through reference to antiblack racism. Importantly, these assumptions were
held by people of all races and are perhaps most powerfully deployed by African
Americans. For example, Bayard Rustin’s 1986 speech “The New ‘Niggers’ Are Gays”:
“Today, blacks are no longer the litmus paper or the barometer of social change. Blacks
are in every segment of society and there are laws that help to protect them from racial
discrimination. The new ‘niggers’ are gays. . . . Gay people are the new barometer for
social change. . . . The question of social change should be framed with the most
vulnerable group in mind: gay people.”229 Here Rustin illustrates that the spectacularity
of antiblack violence in the 1960s made the nation’s treatment of citizens of African
descent—from enslavement to the passage of civil rights legislation—signify both abjection and hard-won subjectivity. Both the recognition of historical injustice and legal equality were achieved through righteous protest. Like Rustin, James Tinney illuminates the complex interanimations of black and queer identity in the post-civil-rights era. Once in Washington, DC, Tinney also began to construct an openly gay identity by increasingly using black working-class Christianity as a vehicle for advancing a faith- based, gay-affirming sexual ethic. He conceived a black gospel of gay liberation based on a selective narrative of the winning of black civil rights—from the 1954 Brown vs. Board of Education of Topeka, KS decision to the series of legislation intended to advance racial equality: the Civil Rights Act of 1964 (employment antidiscrimination), the Voting
229 While Rustin’s role in planning the March on Washington has been rightly recognized, the rush to reclaim him as a gay hero has glossed over his series of career-jeopardizing rendezvous with young white men. Scholars have not yet critically analyzed his refusal to be included in Joseph Beam’s anthology on the experiences of black gay men. Bayard Rustin, Time on Two Crosses: The Collected Writings of Bayard Rustin, eds. Devon Carbado and Donald Weise (San Francisco: Cleis Press, 2003), 275.
118 Rights Act of 1965, and the Civil Rights Act of 1968 (fair housing). In this narrative,
legal redress of antiblack racism was won by social protest bolstered by black evangelical
Christianity.
A significant blow to Tinney’s idealization of black culture and community occurred as he applied for tenure at Howard. Tinney had been hired as an instructor in the
School of Communications in 1976, two years before successfully defending his dissertation. He remained on the faculty and on December 6, 1979, the School Wide
Appointments and Promotions Committee reappointed him to the rank of assistant professor effective August 1, 1980, through May 31, 1982. The following week he wrote a memo to Mary Luins Small, chair of the Journalism Department, in which he formally requested that he be reconsidered for the rank of associate professor with tenure. He was once again passed over for tenure in February of 1980 and remained at the rank of assistant professor. During this time, Tinney became more open about his sexual orientation and theological stance and in November 1981, Dean Lionel C. Barrow, Jr. informed Tinney that his appointment would not be renewed. Nevertheless, a May 3,
1982, letter from Dean Barrow informed Tinney that his promotion and indefinite tenure had been approved by President James E. Cheek on April 29, 1982. Effective August 1,
1982, Tinney was a full-time associate professor of journalism with an annual salary of
$22,800.
The victory was short-lived, however. In June, Tinney was accused of submitting false absence reports and failing to provide a substitute teacher for his classes. He was also cited for failing to post office hours, but later discovered that two other faculty members, including a member of the executive committee, did not have hours posted and
119 had not been notified either verbally or in writing, as Tinney had been. Tinney wrote to
Lawrence Kaggwa, the department chair: “I cannot help but notice that this treatment—
and the growing number of accusatory memoranda being sent to me—seem to have
occurred since it became known that I am a homosexual.”230
In October 1983, Kaggwa reprimanded Tinney for being out sick without securing
someone to teach in his place and warned that medical disability was cause for dismissal.
Tinney, copying Dean Barrow, protested in writing that Kaggwa’s medical disability
warning contradicted the faculty handbook. Moreover, Tinney had never heard of a
professor being required to provide a substitute teacher and “not only is this not normal
procedure for our department, it appears that I am being singled out for prejudicial
treatment in this regard.”231 Tinney retained representation of a lawyer to handle
employment disputes with Howard University. The harassment continued and, in
December, Dr. Kaggwa informed Tinney that an additional class had been added to his
teaching load “because of adjustments in course assignments for journalism faculty
members.”232 Tinney responded in a December 20, 1983, letter “to protest the additional
work load by calling attention to several facts which, once again, show that I am being
singled out for discriminatory and unequal treatment” including that the course would
bring his load to twelve hours, three more than any other faculty member, and that the
course met on Tues/Thurs while his other classes met Mon/Wed/Fri.233 Tinney noted that
in seven years in the department, he had never taught courses on Tues/Thurs and that no
230 Correspondence between James Tinney and Lawrence Kaggwa. June 1982–December 1983. James Tinney Papers, Moorland-Spingarn, Howard University Archives. 231 Ibid. 232 Ibid. 233 Ibid.
120 other teacher had been assigned classes meeting all five days of the week. Of the other
full-time faculty, four were required to teach only two days each week. Also, the course required lesson preparation as he had never taught it before. “What exacerbates the unfairness of this situation is the fact that I am a senior faculty member with tenure, yet I
am being treated as a person of lower rank and position.”234 Although, he retained his
position, the fight with black faculty challenged his idealization of membership in the
black community.
Tinney’s post-civil-rights blackness also illustrates the zenith of what appears to be an American ethic of response—a set of moral principles based on actively positioning oneself outside of oppressive behavior through expressed affection, affinity, or allegiance.235 As a scholar, journalist, and person of faith, Tinney was critical of white
men who wrote about black life “rather than live it.”236 He said that he decided to become
a part of the Black community before realizing that he could write about the experience.
John Howard Griffin, a journalist, and Grace Halsell, a speechwriter for President
Lyndon Johnson, exemplify this ethic of response. Griffin and Halsell were white
Americans who took drugs to darken their skin as part of elaborate projects to experience
the “truth” of antiblack racism and to counter its moral callousness. James Tinney was
inspired by the ethic that such “immersion journalism” represents. Griffin’s 1961 text,
Black Like Me, chronicled his six-week excursion into Southern white supremacy. In
234 Ibid. 235 In contrast, contemporary postracial claims might be understood as an ethic of nonrecognition and nonresponse—that is, a presumption of impartiality that justifies inaction. 236 Tinney said, “[. . .] when I made up my mind to become a part of the Black community five years ago this book was not even in the planning stages.” This document is a draft of a book proposal and cover letter that was written while Tinney lived at Benton Boulevard in Kansas City, Missouri. Tinney, “Black Christian Theology.”
121 1969, Grace Halsell published Soul Sister: The Journal of a White Woman Who Turned
Herself Black and Went to Live and Work in Harlem and Mississippi, an equally melodramatic account of her six-month passing project. Indeed, Tinney’s identity project was inspired in part by Griffin’s sensational first-hand account of the trauma of being a black person in the American South. Although Griffin and Halsell have been criticized for portraying black identity as primarily a response to white racism, their projects are believed to have caused many white Americans to denounce antiblack violence. Neither
Griffin nor Halsell were Pentecostals but, like Tinney, they crafted a black identity in order to establish a moral position, one that exposed the reality of antiblack racism, even as it positioned them outside of it.
Within the context of the civil rights movement, Black Like Me was important for the way it convinced white America of the terror of racial abjection. Over the course of six weeks, and securely fixed in the identity with the aid of medicine used to treat vitiligo, Griffin’s performance neither questioned nor disrupted white racism as much as illuminated Negro life as struggle, pain, and despair. “I was in hell. Hell could be no more lonely [sic] or hopeless, no more agonizingly estranged from the world of order and harmony.”237 Thus, the very culture he intended to critique through his racial experiment remained idealized, while the culture of African Americans seemed pitiable: “It was the ghetto. Now I belonged here. . . . Here it was pennies and clutter and spittle on the curb.”238 When Griffin ended the experiment, he said that he was no longer able to endure the “degradation—not of myself but of all men who were black like me.”239
237 John Howard Griffin, Black Like Me (New York: Penguin, 1961), 66. 238 Ibid., 18. 239 Ibid., 127.
122 Halsell’s Soul Sister offered a parodic rendition of black consciousness.
Attempting to echo Black Power rhetoric, Halsell lamented daily indignities such as a
“whitey’s” expectation that she smile at him. She barely survived being raped by a white
man whose wife had hired her to work as a domestic in Mississippi and later accused
middle-class blacks of being inauthentic—“‘white people’ who happen to have black
skins.”240 After her experiment ended, Halsell declared, “I am cast in a twin, paradoxical
role of oppressor and oppressed. . . . I am black as well as white[.]”241
Griffin’s and Halsell’s projects required significant physical and emotional labor
increased empathy for blacks in some white readers but did so by centering whiteness.
Literary scholar Gayle Wald noted that Griffin presented his experiment as “a heroic
enterprise of white male self-discovery” that ultimately “suggests the limits of passing as
an epistemological strategy, as well as the limits of the discourse of cross-racial empathy
as a liberal strategy of political alliance” even though it represents a sincere effort to
prove the reality of racism.242 According to Wald, Griffin believed that other white
people could be moved “by the power of moral suasion” to change their attitudes toward
black people.243 Philip Brian Harper offered a less generous reading of Griffin and
Halsell, but recognized that both imagined their journalistic projects as a “substantive
social intervention.”244 Instead, they exhibited the “political ambiguity” of the white
240 Grace Halsell, Soul Sister: The Journal of a White Woman Who Turned Herself Black and Went to Live and Work in Harlem and Mississippi (New York: World, 1969), 61, 71; Grace Halsell, “I Lived Six Months as a Black Woman,” Ebony (December 1969), 129. 241 Halsell, Soul Sister, 206–207. 242 Gayle Wald, “‘A Most Disagreeable Mirror’: Reflections on White Identity in Black Like Me,” in Passing and the Fictions of Identity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996), 22. 243 Wald, “A Most Disagreeable Mirror,” 154. 244 Phillip Brian Harper, Are We Not Men?: Masculine Anxiety and the Problem of African-American Identity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 124.
123 passing narrative by reporting on racial inequality without challenging the white
supremacist logic that perpetuates it. More directly, by imagining themselves as central to
the project of black subjectivity, Griffin and Halsell illustrate what Wald termed “the
cultural imagination of social mobility in a context in which racial definition is no longer
seen as an impediment to occupational or economic advancement.”245
James Tinney intended his identity project to transcend the immersion journalism
of Griffin and Halsell.246 Whereas they imagined themselves as chroniclers and
combatants of antiblack racism, Tinney chose to be black and embraced the Black
Panthers’ teachings, which gave voice to the anger that he felt after King’s assassination.
Tinney’s dissertation was a comparative study of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating
Committee, the Black Panther Party, and Black Pentecostalism. Its focus indicates that he
not only believed Pentecostalism had political significance, but that the power of God
could be invoked to combat the sins of social injustice. The introduction to his
dissertation indicates that feelings of anger did not negate his faith and faith remained a
central component of his identity because Tinney perceived himself as a rebel:
contradiction between this and my Pentecostal faith. From the year 1956, when I too “got the Holy Ghost’” in a little, block windowless building near Missouri River levee in Kansas City’s Harlem, I have always felt that my religion had political meaning—it was always an expression of my rejection and rebellion. There were other meanings to be sure. For while King and the Panthers have come and gone, my faith remains. Now, many years later, I have made my accommodations to American society the best I know how. But inwardly I am still
245 Wald, “A Most Disagreeable Mirror,” 22. 246 Tinney’s identity project might also be read as a commentary on wealthy whites who were momentarily enamored with socially oppressed groups. Tom Wolfe recounts the night Leonard Bernstein invited his elite circle of friends to encounter the Black Panther Party and more generally described a moment in which wealthy whites hobnobbed with groups striving for social equality. Though intended to be humorous, Wolfe depicts this mingling with the poor as nostalgie de la boue, a phrase that literally means “desire for mud” and is used figuratively to refer to the desire for degradation, even depravity. I offer special thanks to Kip Kosek for alerting me to this phenomenon. Tom Wolfe, Radical Chic & Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1970).
124 a rebel. And so I write.247
Tinney claimed here to have channeled his faith and anger into scholarship about black
social movement as an “accommodation” to changes in American politics since the tragic
ends of the King era of civil rights and the Black Power movement. The end of those
movements shifted conceptions of black identity away from what bell hooks termed the
“modernist universalizing agenda” of the 1960s toward postmodern conceptions of
identity.248 That shift also opened the way for LGBT Christians to reclaim their faith and
to draw on modernist conceptions of black identity. Postmodernism was useful for
highlighting the voices of women, gays and lesbians, and others whose experiences had
been silenced in dominant, androcentric narratives of black identity and history. Among
consequences to the ongoing fight for black political equality was the loss of a coherent,
though admittedly partial, articulation of the conditions in which the masses of black
people lived and specific demands for redress: “The period directly after the black power
movement was a time when major news magazines carried articles with cocky headlines
like ‘what ever happened to Black America?’ This was an ironic reply to the aggressive
unmet demand by decentered, marginalized black subjects who had at least for the
moment successfully demanded a hearing, who had made it possible for black liberation
to be a national political agenda. In the wake of the black power movement, after so
many rebels were slaughtered and lost, many of these voices were silenced by a
247 James S. Tinney, “A Theoretical and Historical Comparison of Black Political and Religious Movements” (PhD diss., Howard University, 1978), iii–iv. 248 Hooks continued: “. . . it has become necessary to find new avenues for transmitting the messages of black liberation struggle, new ways to talk about racism and other politics of domination. Radical postmodernist practice, most powerfully conceptualized as a ‘politics of difference,’ should incorporate the voices of displaced, marginalized, exploited, and oppressed black people.” bell hooks, “Postmodern Blackness.”
125 repressive state and others became inarticulate[.]”249 In other words, whereas the
“modern universalizing agenda” of the previous decades of black politics made national
concern for racial justice possible, radical black organizing was quashed by state violence
and survivors of that political moment reconnoitered, hoping to build on the legislative
wins of the King era of civil rights.250
Of course, there was no way for James Tinney to know that critiques of
essentialist conceptions of identity would emerge at the same time that he established
himself as a member of the faculty of Howard University’s Department of Journalism.
Tinney was busy constructing his identity as a respected historian of black periodicals
and immersing himself in black Christian culture as an academic ambassador of black
Pentecostalism. During that time, he began to demonstrate the entrepreneurial spirit he
brought to the study of black religion. For example, he convened the first Black Religion
Writers Conference at Howard University in 1979. The conference theme was “Coverage
of Black Religion by the Daily Press,” and presenters included black Protestant, Catholic,
and Muslim editors.251 He also penned the controversial history of William J. Seymour and the black origins of Pentecostalism.252 Lastly, Tinney and Howard University
chaplain Reverend Stephen Short founded Spirit: A Journal of Issues Incident to Black
Pentecostalism at Howard University in 1977. It was the first journal to present ecstatic
249 http://www.africa.upenn.edu/Articles_Gen/Postmodern_Blackness_18270.html. Accessed March 12, 2011. 250 David L. Chappell, Waking from the Dream: The Struggle for Civil Rights in the Shadow of Martin Luther King, Jr. (New York: Random House, 2014). 251 Justine Rector, “Black Religion Writers Hold First Conference,” Washington Post, August 2, 1979. 252 James S. Tinney, “William J. Seymour: Father of Modern-Day Pentecostalism,” in Black Apostles: Afro- American Clergy Confront the Twentieth Century, ed. Randall K. Burkett and Richard Newman (Boston: G. K. Hall and Co., 1978).
126 black religion as a legitimate object of scholarly attention.253
In an attempt to bring affirming Christian scholarship to Pentecostalism, the second issue of Spirit contained Tinney’s article “Homosexuality as a Pentecostal
Phenomenon” and began a long period in which leaders of the Church of God in Christ
(COGIC) began to publicly address his claims about homosexuality. The article challenged the very binary upon which ex-gay ministries were premised: “Christians are not only homosexuals by inclination but also by practice, whether frequently or infrequently.”254 As evidence, he cited books published in the early 1970s that offered candid accounts of Protestants and Catholics who struggled to change their sexuality without lasting success. Citing Pentecostal Holiness historian Vinson Synan, Tinney noted that Charles Parham, the man many white Pentecostals claimed as the founder of modern Pentecostalism, was widely rumored to have been “a practicing homosexual.”255
Tinney thought that this fact would prove that same-sex behavior did not preclude relationship with God.
253 James Tinney is still respected as a “black theologian” and “black Pentecostal scholar.” According to Sana Loue: “Dr. James Tinney, a Black, gay Pentecostal minister, founded the African American gay/lesbian church, Faith Temple, following his excommunication from [. . .] the Church of God in Christ.” Sana Loue, Sexualities and Identities of Minority Women (New York: Springer, 2009), 154. Also, Harlon L. Dalton named James S. Tinney as an exception in his critique of “gay black writers” who decried racism in the white gay community but failed to denounce homophobia in the straight black community. Harlon L. Dalton, “AIDS in Blackface,” in Black Men on Race, Gender, and Sexuality: A Critical Reader, ed. Devon Carbado (New York: New York University, 1999), 336, note 25. Lastly, arguments for locating the origins of Pentecostalism within black America were traced “back to the 1970s in the writings of black scholars James Tinney and Leonard Lovett, neither of whom was a historian, and European missions scholar Walter Hollenweger.” Augusto Cerillo, “Beginnings of American Pentecostalism,” in Pentecostal Currents in American Protestantism, ed. Edith L. Blumhofer, Russell P. Spittler, and Grant A. Wacker (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois, 1999), 237. 254 James S. Tinney, “Homosexuality as a Pentecostal Phenomenon,” Spirit: A Journal of Issues Incident to Black Pentecostalism 1, no. 2 (1977), 57. 255 William J. Seymour, the black man Tinney recognized as the “father” of Pentecostalism, is said to have rejected Charles Parham’s authority for this reason. Vinson Synan, as quoted in note 11 of Tinney, “Homosexuality as a Pentecostal Phenomenon,” 57. See also James S. Tinney, “William J. Seymour: Father of Modern-Day Pentecostalism,” The Journal of the Interdenominational Theological Center 4, no. 1 (1976).
127 As Tinney completed his dissertation, LGBT Christians began to publish
interpretations of scripture that were feminist and affirming of lesbian and gay identities.
Nancy Hardesty, founder of Evangelical and Ecumenical Women’s Caucus, published a
pamphlet from her dissertation research in which she advanced feminist interpretations of
biblical texts to affirm same-sex love and to reject Christian justifications for the
subordination of women.256 An Anglican theologian, Reverend Norman Pittenger
challenged biblical and moral objections to homosexuality.257 Reverend Michael England of Metropolitan Community Church (MCC) countered homophobic distillations of the
Bible by emphasizing the importance of “the genuine interpretation of each passage.”258
England warned evangelicals against taking figurative language literally and admonished
that “Jesus himself engaged in biblical interpretation. While he insisted on the authority
of the Bible, he did criticize and reinterpret it.”259
The work of England, Hardesty, Pittenger, and others exemplified the Protestant
belief that every Christian is equipped to do the work of interpreting scripture. It also
reflected a belief that asserting the historical and cultural contingency of Christian truth
might disprove transhistorical faith-based justifications for antigay rhetorical and
physical violence. More directly, England cited the Apostle Paul to argue that such
256 Nancy Hardesty, God Has No Sexual Preference: An Open Letter on Homosexuality (Albuquerque, NM: Galation 3:28 Press, 1983). James Tinney Papers, Moorland-Spingarn, Howard University Archives. Hardesty’s first book, All We’re Meant to Be: A Biblical Approach to Women’s Liberation, was coauthored with Letha Dawson Scanzoni and published in 1974. It was noteworthy for introducing biblical feminism to evangelical women. Letha Dawson Scanzoni and Nancy Hardesty, All We’re Meant to Be: A Biblical Approach to Women’s Liberation (Nashville, TN: Word Publishing, 1973). 257 Norman Pittenger, Homosexuals and the Bible: A New Look at Biblical and Other Religious and Moral Objections to Homosexuality (Los Angeles, CA: Universal Fellowship Press, 1977). James Tinney Papers, Moorland-Spingarn, Howard University Archives. 258 Michael E. England, The Bible and Homosexuality (Washington, DC: Beulahland Press, Metropolitan Community Church of Washington, 1977). 259 Ibid.
128 prohibitions found in Leviticus 18:22 and 20:13 no longer carried the force of law
because of Christ’s substitutionary atonement. Rather, those passages from Leviticus
should be read as prohibitions against adopting cultures of other peoples and the practice
of sodomizing conquered men, which, England argued, violated the basic dignity of a
man in that it “treat[ed] him as property in the way one would treat a woman.”260
Gay-affirming Christians were beginning to see ministry as a kind of activism,
and Tinney collected the writing of ministers and theologians who actively refuted faith-
based homophobia. E. Lawrence Gibson published an article in Gaysweek, based on a
presentation he had given at his alma mater, Princeton Theological Seminary. “The
Sodom Syndrome” challenged traditional readings of Sodom and Gomorrah, passages in
Leviticus, and the New Testament. “Disturbingly, nowhere in the Bible is Lot condemned
for offering his daughters for rape. Why do so many of those who scream ‘Sodom and
Gomorrah’ to condemn homosexuals not also condone rape of women?”261 Gibson
decried the “select[ive] literalism” of nonaffirming Christians and deemed them “as
repugnant as the church’s earlier attempts to justify slavery and the oppression of women
or to refute the findings of biological and physical sciences.”262
Christian Identity Politics and Conversion
260 In making this assertion, England is more invested in disproving biblical prohibitions than interrogating the sexism inherent in them. England, The Bible and Homosexuality. 261 Clip in James Tinney papers. E. Lawrence Gibson with illustration by Vernon E. Berg III, “The Sodom Syndrome,” Gaysweek, April 24, 1978, 9; also, “Minister as Activist: Chris Glaser,” The Advocate, June 14, 1978, 33. James Tinney Papers, Manuscript Division, Moorland-Spingarn Research Center, Howard University. 262 Clip in James Tinney Papers. Gibson, “The Sodom Syndrome,” 18.
129
Figure 1: Tinney and church leaders laying hands during prayer and asking for God to touch the person in need. From the private papers of Elder Michael Vanzant, of Tinney’s church, Faith Temple.263 The political project of coming out as LGBT and Christian relied upon the notion
that an increased vocal visibility would confound faith-based homophobia. Tinney took
this assumption a step further by coming out as black, gay, and Christian in hopes of
harnessing the presumed cultural and political power of the black church to the national
fight for gay rights and to his personal fight to regain the moral authority afforded by the
Pentecostal church. Although churches have historically fulfilled the “Great
Commission” through domestic and international evangelistic missions to convert
nonbelievers to belief in Jesus Christ, LGBT Christians such as Tinney asserted Christian
Identity as a way to establish political subjectivity within the continually unfolding
narrative American of social progress in the post-civil-rights era. One reason for the strategic use of religion in social reform movements, both progressive and conservative, is that it helped people create a sense of belonging from shared ideals. For African
American LGBT Christians who still valued the tradition, for example, reclaiming their faith was a means of queering black Christianity. As E. Patrick Johnson notes, “[t]heir
263 “The Legacy of James S. Tinney,” The Eunuch’s Chariot: The Magazine of Faith Temple, Fall, 1988, 6.
130 embrace of Christianity might also be characterized as an instance of disidentification,
whereby queers of color perform within dominant ideologies in order to resist those same
hegemonic structures [and to propagate] gay Christianity as a legitimate signifier of
blackness.”264
Dominant narratives of Christian conversion provided a model for Tinney’s identity project. Conversion simultaneously constructs an individual Christian identity and a shared identity as a member of “the beloved community” or “the body of Christ” for the new convert. Therefore, Tinney’s identity project is akin to the spiritual conversion experience: “Conversion is an inner transformation which quickens the supernatural imagination as it places new believers within the central storied sequence of the Christian bible and enables them to approach the bible as a living reality. Conversion transfers new authority—the Holy Spirit—to the newly faithful as well as the wherewithal to narrate one’s life in Christian terms.”265
Tinney’s conversion was a quickening of racial and religious imagination that
centered his experience of condemnation and rejection within the history and
contemporary example of American racism. Although he labored under a romantic notion
of what it meant to be black and Christian, James Tinney’s characterizations of race and
sexuality reveal the identarian struggle of a generation. The spectacularity of civil rights
marches and state-sanctioned violence in response proved the nation’s purported
commitment to the equality of all citizens to be a tragic falsehood. Nevertheless, the
prominence of faith leaders and laity in the movement suggested that those who
264 E. Patrick Johnson, Appropriating Blackness: Performance and the Politics of Authenticity (Durham, NC: Duke University, 2003), 39. 265 Harding, The Book of Jerry Falwell, 34.
131 supported racial discrimination and violence could be overcome with faith and
determination, although at great cost.
Even though James Tinney had been delivered from faith-based homophobia, that
deliverance came at a significant sacrifice and his subsequent identity project evidences
the means by which he transformed his experience of exile into the foundation for a new
identity. When his acceptance of his sexual orientation led to separation from his family,
Tinney experienced what Bellah et al. describe as a “crisis of civic membership.”266 Civic
membership “points to that critical intersection of personal identity with social identity. If
we face a crisis of civic identity, it is not just a social crisis, it is a personal crisis as
well.”267 Tinney experienced a loss of social capital and personal identity when he was rejected by his family and church community. His decision to become part of the black community, as he imagined it in the historically black city of Washington, DC, at the historically black Howard University, was an elaborate attempt to regain: “[t]he confident sense of selfhood that comes from membership in a society in which we believe, where we both trust and feel trusted, and to which we feel we securely belong: this is exactly what is threatened by a crisis of civic membership.”268 Insofar as Christian Identity
facilitates a sense of belonging, or membership, it can help believers achieve resolution
of the crisis Bellah et al. describe.
Resolution of alienation is possible through Christian Identity because although it
is grounded in personal belief, it is performed through relationship to others. A challenge
266 Robert Bellah, Richard Madsen, William M. Sullivan, Ann Swidler, and Steven M. Tipton, Habits of the Heart: Individualism and Commitment in American Life (University of California Press: 1996), xi. 267 Ibid., xi–xii. 268 Ibid., xii.
132 to this argument might be that some people practice their own brand of religion. Indeed,
many religious Americans shifted away from identifying themselves primarily through
denominational affiliation after World War II and began to organize themselves
according to issues and “themes that untied evangelicals from many different
denominations,” including the civil rights and antiwar movements in the 1960s and
backlash to various social justice movements in the 1970s and 1980s.269 Americans also
began to practice highly individualized religions, by which they retained important
aspects of original faith traditions and eschewed those that were undesirable.270 Perhaps
the best example is Sheila Larson who coined the term “Sheilaism” to describe her faith:
“I believe in God. I’m not a religious fanatic. I can’t remember the last time I went to
church. My faith has carried me a long way. It’s Sheilaism,” which she defined as “It’s
just to try to love yourself and be gentle with yourself. You know, I guess take care of
each other. I think He [God] would want us to take care of each other.”271 While Larson
describes the individualized spiritual beliefs of a woman who has eschewed organized religion, it is important to note that her faith is still defined in relationship to other people of faith, in that she was “not a religious fanatic,” was not a member of a congregation, and yet emphasized both self-care (which might be understood as a corrective to a lack of care from others) and care for others as key aspects of Sheilaism. Larson had liberated
herself from the oppressive conformity of her family life and “‘Sheilaism’ is rooted in the
effort to transform external authority into internal meaning.”272 Tinney was similarly
269 Wuthnow, The Restructuring of American Religion, 4. 270 Bellah et al., Habits of the Heart; Wade Clark Roof, A Generation of Seekers: The Spiritual Journeys of the Baby Boom Generation (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University, 1999). 271 Bellah et al., Habits of the Heart, 221. 272 Ibid., 235.
133 engaged in creating a unique Christian Identity. Rooted in the conception of “identity
politics” that arose from the social movements of the 1960s, it was part of a broader
strategy to combat faith-based bigotry.
Identity politics call attention to social conditions arising from particular gender and racial identities.273 Critics have rightly noted that it is impossible to speak for all
people with whom you share a category of identity and that referencing identity-based
experiences of injustice does nothing to disrupt the discourse that creates the conditions
for injustice to persist.274 Tinney’s decision to live at the intersection of black, gay, and
Christian identities is an example of what Muñoz meant by the term “disidentify”: “to
hold on to [an experience of negation or loss] and invest it with new life.”275 That is,
Tinney used these known categories of identity to fashion something that fully
represented none of them. Building on Althusser’s theory of subject formation and
interpellation, Muñoz called attention to the response of the minoritarian subject as he is
“called into being or ‘hailed’”276 In particular, Tinney’s racial identification might best be
understood as an interpellatory response—in turning from hegemonic whiteness and
antigay Christianity and turning to the communitarian ethic he perceived as the defining
element of the black church (and his chosen racial identity as pastiche)—in that Tinney is
borrowing from known iterations of black expression, politics, and religiosity, essentially
“performing” blackness in much the same way that Judith Butler’s theory of gender
273 See, for example, the locus classicus of identity politics, Combahee River Collective, “A Black Feminist Statement,” in Still Brave: The Evolution of Black Women’s Studies, ed. Stanlie M. James, Frances Smith Foster, and Beverly Guy-Sheftall (New York: City University of New York, 2009). 274 Joan Scott argues that scholars should attend to the discursive construction of identities and not subjective experiences. Joan Scott, “The Evidence of Experience,” Critical Inquiry 17, no. 4 (1991), 778. 275 Muñoz, Disidentifications, 12. 276 Ibid., 11.
134 performativity reveals gender as pastiche, the endless repetition of pre-existing notions of
what it means to be male and female.277 This gesture toward Butler is particularly
important for understanding that what constitutes authentic blackness remains a topic of
debate within African American communities.
James Tinney’s friends suggested that he possessed a political sensibility that
made his black consciousness authentic, in that his politics privileged the experiences of
black people.278 African American performance theorist, E. Patrick Johnson, however,
rejected the notion of authentic blackness altogether. Johnson’s argument is that everyone
appropriates blackness in order to amass cultural capital and black people discriminate
against white people when they try to exclude them from performing blackness. As
Marlon Riggs explores in the documentary Black Is, Black Ain’t, conflicts arise when black lesbians and gays threaten those who perceive heterosexuality as a necessary element of black normativity, one that refutes white supremacist constructions of black sexual deviance. Johnson used Riggs’s project about black queer identity to argue for a postmodern conception of blackness that recognizes “that darker hue does not give any more cultural capital or claim to blackness than do a daishiki, braids or a southern accent.
Masculinity is no more a signifier of blackness than femininity; heterosexuality is no blacker than gayness; and poverty makes one no more authentically black than a house in the suburbs.”279 Johnson shored up his claim that “blackness” belongs to no one and
277 Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1990). 278 ABilly Jones-Hennin (co-founder National Black Lesbian and Gay Coalition), in discussions with the author, June 2010–September 2012; Gil Gerald (co-founder National Black Lesbian and Gay Coalition), in discussions with the author, June 2010; Isaiah Poole (assistant pastor, Faith Temple), in discussions with the author, July 2011; Gloria Nurse (friend who also claimed to be the girlfriend of James Tinney’s girlfriend), in discussions with the author, June 2012. 279 Johnson, Appropriating Blackness, 40.
135 further problematized authentic blackness by citing Regina Bendix: “the notion of
authenticity implies the existence of its opposite, the fake, and this dichotomous construct
is at the heart of what makes authenticity problematic.”280 Although Bendix was writing
about notions of authenticity in folklore studies as it emerged among German-speaking
Europeans and Americans, Johnson cites her to argue that even African Americans
disagree about what properly represents black culture, including hairstyle, clothing, and
speech, which suggests that any effort to prove James Tinney’s authentic blackness is
pointless.
Johnson is more interested in whether white Americans construct or “essentialize”
blackness in order to “maintain ‘whiteness’ as the master trope of purity, supremacy, and
entitlement, as a ubiquitous signifier that seems invisible,” which he associates with
histories of antiblack violence and discrimination.281 Signaling his own investment in
post-civil-rights blackness, he asserts that “the tropes of blackness that whites circulated
in the past—Mammy, Sapphire, Jezebel, Jim Crow, Sambo, Zip Coon, pickaninny, and
Stepin Fetchit, and now enlarged to include welfare queen, prostitute, rapist, drug addict,
prison inmate, etc.—have historically insured physical violence, poverty, institutional
racism, and second-class citizenry for blacks.”282 Johnson says that white appropriation
of blackness is “an even more complicated dynamic,” because white Americans’
performances of black signifiers bear “the historical weight of white skin privilege [that]
280 Ibid., 3. 281 Ibid. 282 Johnson’s superficial attempt at a historicization of stereotypes arises from his belief that expressions of antiblack racism are no longer immediately threatening despite the history of economic violence against African Americans throughout centuries of enslavement and racial segregation, which he distills as follows: “cultural usurpation has been a common practice of white Americans and their relation to art forms not their own.” Johnson, Appropriating Blackness, 4.
136 necessarily engenders a tense relationship with its Others.”283 While Johnson does not
acknowledge that such “tension” is the contemporary effect of the legal theft of the wages
of generations of black workers until the Civil Rights Act of 1964 ended employment
discrimination, his definition of white appropriation of blackness gets closer to the life
that Tinney created as a scholar, activist, and person of faith. More than Johnson’s efforts
to explain cross-racial appropriation is the distinction he makes between performance
theory and theories of performativity as a result of lived experience.
Johnson’s first-grade teacher reprimanded him and another little boy for breaking
a record by yelling, “you two little colored boys!”284 Johnson’s mother later assured him
of his value, and the teacher became Johnson’s patron: she paid for piano lessons, bought
his first musical instrument, and sent him money when he graduated from high school
and college. His teacher’s “benevolent racism” exemplified ways that white and black
people construct blackness with ambivalence and ambiguity and ground it in both love
and aversion. He notes that “like others who come into their blackness through trauma, it
was a painful knowledge of identity (as opposed to learning it from my mother) because
it came to me as a reprimand.”285 Looking back, he interpreted the event as “the play
between performativity and performance, between discourse and life as lived.”286
Tinney’s identity project, therefore, is not a matter of racial authenticity as much as an
invitation to consider what can be learned from his historically specific performance
because “theories of performance, as opposed to theories of performativity, also take into
283 Johnson is referencing bell hooks’ writing on racial fetishization in Black Looks: Race and Representation (Boston, MA: South End, 1992); Johnson, Appropriating Blackness, 4. 284 Johnson, Appropriating Blackness, 249–251. 285 Ibid., 251. 286 Ibid.
137 account the context and historical moment of performance.”287
Black Consciousness
My perceptions about race are not something I have to explain to activist Black Gay men. . . . It’s all understood. We share a language, culture, values, the African genius, family ties—in short we share Blackness. —Barbara Smith, 1986288
Thirty years after Tinney’s death, core black gay activists in DC, including his
friends ABilly Jones-Hennin and the other six founders of the National Coalition of
Black Lesbians and Gays (NCBLG), claim James Tinney fiercely: “He was one of us.”289
Gil Gerald, former executive director of NCBLG, echoed Jones-Hennin when he said that
Tinney had a “black consciousness” and still describes himself as “a close, personal
friend of James.”290 Jones-Hennin acknowledged that some people doubted Tinney’s
black identity, but concluded “there’s no denial about his contributions to the black
community and there’s no denial that he identified himself [as a black man].”291 As one
of them, however, Tinney came to realize that black LGBT people were working to
declare that homosexuality did not nullify their membership within the wider black
community: “we are as Black as we are Gay and as Gay as we are Black.”292 After
287 E. Patrick Johnson, “‘Quare’ Studies, or (Almost) Everything I Know About Queer Studies I Learned from My Grandmother,” in Black Queer Studies: A Critical Anthology, eds. E. Patrick Johnson and Mae G. Henderson (Durham, NC: Duke University, 2005), 138. 288 Barbara Smith, “Working for Liberation and Having a Damn Good Time!” Black/Out: The National Magazine of the National Coalition of Black Lesbians and Gays 1, no. 1 (Summer 1986), 17. 289 ABilly Jones-Hennin (co-founder National Black Lesbian and Gay Coalition), in discussions with the author, June 2010–September 2012. 290 James S. Tinney, “The Challenges of Being Black and Gay,” The Washington Blade, February 18, 1982. 291 ABilly Jones-Hennin, in discussions with the author, June 2010–September 2012. 292 According to ABilly Jones-Hennin, Tinney was paraphrasing a motto of the National Black Lesbian and Gay Coalition: “We are as proud of our gayness as we are our blackness.” ABilly Jones-Hennin, in discussions with the author, June 2010–September 2012. Tinney, “The Challenges of Being Black and Gay.”
138 Temple Church of God in Christ excommunicated Tinney in 1982 for becoming more
open about his sexuality, Tinney penned an essay that echoed many of the concerns of
black LGBT Christians: “It is the white system that convinces Black men to pattern their
sexism after the order of white sexism. […] It is also the white ‘moral majority,’ white
heterosexism, and white homophobia that reward Black institutions for pressuring Black
gays to stay in the closet.”293 Gerald picketed the congregation along with sixteen other
gays. When asked why Tinney, or any phenotypically white person, might present
himself as black, Gil Gerald said it was possible that for some white people, those who
were “revolted by racism, it was not good enough just to pass [as black.]”294 Pausing to
reflect on Tinney’s place in the black gay community, Gerald was clear, “if James Tinney
says he’s black, then he’s black. Frankly, I don’t care.”295
Gil Gerald and ABilly Jones-Hennin emphasized that Tinney’s “black consciousness” convinced them of his black identity far more than his declaration of
identity. As the quote by Barbara Smith indicates, the term “black consciousness” meant
different things to different people in the 1970s and 1980s, but Gerald, Jones-Hennin, and
Tinney himself linked it with a particular commitment to promoting the welfare of black
Americans and denouncing covert racism within nascent majoritarian Christian and political rhetoric. Tinney explained the difference between the civil rights movement and
Jerry Falwell’s emergent moral majority movement in a sermon preached at All Souls
Church in 1980: “The civil rights and anti-war movements used religion […] to appeal to the moral nature of all persons; but this new [moral majority] movement uses religion as
293 Tinney, “The Challenges of Being Black and Gay.” 294 Gil Gerald, interview with the author, June 14, 2010. 295 Ibid.
139 a front to deny the moral capabilities and moral competencies of others. [Further,] issues then were defined in terms of political realities such as the exclusion of a race; but born-
again politics defines issues in terms of political symbols such as ‘bringing America back
to God,’ whatever that means.”296 Tinney also preached that issues most important to the
Right were “based on subtle racial implications reflecting the white conservative
religious bias.”297 He meant that Christian conservatives’ opposition to feminism, gay rights, gun control, and homosexuality was a means to shore up what they perceived as the attack on traditional gender roles and traditional race relations in the United States.
Tinney linked the Right’s agenda to Victorianism and capitalism, arguing that “[t]hey reflect the twin concerns for matters relating to sex and property [which] is why a person who steals another’s TV set gets far worse penalties than [white collar criminals] in our city who make criminal under-the-table deals every day.”298
Civil rights advances across the country led Tinney and other activists to believe
that change was inevitable. In the nation’s capital, gays were critical to Mayor Marion
Barry’s successful reelection and Barry participated in the1979 March on Washington for
Lesbian and Gay Rights. On January 24, 1979, the Detroit City Council voted eight to
one in favor of “a new human rights ordinance which include[d] a ban on discrimination
because of sexual orientation.”299 California Governor Edmund G. “Jerry” Brown had
called for state legislation prohibiting discrimination in employment because of sexual
296 “(Tinney Warns at All Souls) Coalition between Right Wing Religion, Politics ‘Dangerous,’” Baltimore Afro-American, November 1, 1980, 21. 297 Ibid. 298 Ibid. 299 The bills were introduced, respectively, by Democratic Rep. Art Agnos of San Francisco and Senator Milton Marks, a Republican from San Francisco. “Jerry Brown Calls for Gay Rights,” Washington Blade, February 15, 1979, 8. “Detroit Approves Gay Rights,” Washington Blade, February 15, 1979, 9.
140 preference and two such bills were introduced in the California Senate and House of
Representatives. Further, affirming Christians across the country were encouraged by the
defeat of the Briggs Initiative and the success of the National March. The sunshine-
yellow cover of the December 1979/January 1980 issue of Journey magazine promised:
“The 80s can be Ours!”300
Conservatives were also becoming convinced of the imminence of gay and
lesbian equality. They responded by planning Washington for Jesus, a
multidenominational gathering of believers from across the country from April 28–29,
1980. Conservatives lobbied and prayed with congressmen as over one hundred thousand
more descended on the National Mall to beseech God on behalf of the country.301 In
response, gay Christians organized the April Alliance, a Washington-based ad hoc liberal
religious coalition. Washington for Jesus organizers advertised heavily in local black
neighborhoods and one of the goals of the April Alliance was to counter their messaging.
Affirming Christians initially planned to protest the gathering but ultimately decided to
respond “in Christian love” by praying for their brothers and sisters in Christ.302 Tinney
joined Troy Perry and the representatives of over twenty gay religious organizations who
met with the Carter Administration in order to“[a]cquaint the Administration with the fact
that there is a Gay religious community which is large and diverse.”303 The cohort of
affirming Christians informed Reverend Dr. Robert L. Maddox, Jr., special assistant for
300 An original copy is contained in the James S. Tinney Papers, Moorland-Spingarn, Howard University Archives, Box 24, file “Sexual Politics.” 301 Marjorie Hyer, “Support for Christian Rally Here Drifting Away,” The Washington Post, March 15, 1980. 302 David Walter, “Reactions to Christian Rally Vary,” Washington Blade, April 17, 1980, 6. 303 Adam DeBaugh, “April 17, 1980 Memo Regarding the White House Meeting,” James Tinney Papers, Manuscript Division, Moorland-Spingarn Research Center, Howard University.
141 religious liaison to the president of the United States, and other Carter Administration
members of “the oppression we face, both as lesbians and gay men and because of our
religious faith, and assured the White House that the religious community in this country
is not monolithic in its opposition to homosexuality and Gay rights.”304
After Tinney’s visit to the White House in 1980, Reverend Stephen Short,
Pentecostal chaplain at Howard University, decided to replace Tinney as faculty advisor
to the William J. Seymour Pentecostal Fellowship. Describing it as “one of the saddest
days of my life,” Tinney said that Short accused him of being: “a Gay Militant; and I
cannot have a Gay Militant as the faculty advisor for the fellowship. . . . I cannot have
anyone in the fellowship who makes a public statement on Gay life at the White
House.”305 Tinney argued that he had merely made a statement in support of gay rights
and not a personal testimony. Unmoved, Short accused Tinney of publicly cruising the
bus station to have anonymous sexual encounters, adding, “What you are doing is against
my own personal beliefs and the doctrinal beliefs of most Pentecostals.”306 Tinney denied
cruising the bus station, explained that he mailed his editorial to the headquarters of the
Baltimore Afro-American newspaper every week from that station, and countered Short’s
claim about Pentecostal’s condemnation of homosexuality:
that the Church of God in Christ was known for its abundance of homosexual preachers, including one of the most prominent pastors in this city; and that if anyone raised the issue, [Short] could simply refer to that fact as a commonality of which I was only one small example. […] The thing that disturbs me the most is that I had considered Steve and [his wife] Betty the ONLY true friends I had, who were in the church, who knew all about me (Steve had known I am a
304 Adam DeBaugh, “April 28, 1980 Correspondence Welcoming Participants in the First Meeting between Representatives of the National Gay Religious Organizations and the Staff of President Carter,” James Tinney Papers, Manuscript Division, Moorland-Spingarn Research Center, Howard University. 305 Typed journal entry read at a memorial service for Tinney. James Tinney Papers. 306 Ibid.
142 practicing homosexual for six years) and yet seemed to be totally accepting.307
Short resented having to answer to other Christians who disagreed with Tinney’s
reconciliation of Christianity and homosexuality. Further, Tinney challenged Short’s
sponsorship of “the all-white, Far Right Wing” event, Washington for Jesus. According
to Tinney, Short presented himself as a radical revolutionary to friends and students but
was, in actuality, “a racial point-man” for the agenda of the right wing.
In 1981, COGIC civil rights activist and Bishop Arthur Brazier of Chicago’s
Apostolic Church of God resigned from the board of Spirit and, in a May 29, 1981, letter,
objected that Tinney had gone beyond “help and understanding” to denying “any sin or
guilt or wrong in active homosexual practice.”308 Brazier finally addressed Tinney’s 1977
article, which had suggested that that same-sex behavior did not preclude relationship with God because one of the founders of Pentecostalism was tried in a Texas court for sodomy. Brazier replied that such actions were sinful nonetheless.309 Another prominent
COGIC leader, Bishop Ithiel Clemmons, published a two-part article denouncing
Tinney’s pro-homosexual theology in COGIC’s national periodical Whole Truth.310
Tinney continued to travel across the country, denouncing racism and
homophobia, conducting seminars, preaching at MCC-Portland and Westminster
Presbyterian Church, and speaking at a candlelight vigil during the Pride celebrations in
Portland, Oregon. In a 1982 interview Tinney told a reporter that he admitted to himself
307 Ibid. 308 “Chicago Cleric Objects to Pro-Gay Pentecostal Stand,” Chicago Gay Life, June 19, 1981, 1, 18. 309 Ibid.; Brazier, who marched with Martin Luther King, Jr. in the 1960s, was a Pentecostal with national influence. President Barack Obama described Brazier as “one of our nation’s leading moral lights[.]” See Margaret Ramirez, “Bishop Arthur M. Brazier, 1921–2010 Civil Rights Legend, Founder of The Woodlawn Organization,” Chicago Tribune, October 22, 2010. 310 Ithiel Clemmons, “The Church of God in Christ and Homosexuality,” The Whole Truth, Summer 1981.
143 that he was homosexual “after a decade of marriage produced two children.”311
According to Tinney:
I think it would be a travesty of God’s grace to ask forgiveness of what I don’t believe is sin. Even if the churches think it is a sin, it is no worse than any other. The church is right about most things. It happens to be wrong about that. […] One must choose whether to accept it or not, or to name it or not, or to repress it or not. It doesn’t go away. […] I believe homosexuality is as God-given as heterosexuality. The mere presence of lesbians and gay men is much evidence that it is as natural as heterosexuality.312
He also mentioned founding the Pentecostal Coalition for Human Rights and that he had
recently received tenure despite controversy regarding his sexual orientation.313
Demonstrating the centrality of race to his gay activism, the Portland Skanner described
him as “one of the nation’s leading Black proponents of Lesbian/Gay rights.”314
At the same time, the larger affirming Christian movement struggled to coalesce.
The American Conference of Lesbian and Gay Christians (ALGRC) was to meet
November 12–14, 1982, in Los Angeles. Reporting on the ALGRC, Father Bob Nugent
said, “[f]or the third time in as many years, gay and lesbian Christian activists,
representatives of church caucuses and people engaged in various church ministries met
in Washington, DC to explore ways of presenting a united front against attacks from the
New Right.”315 Neither the 1979 Homophobia in the Churches conference nor the April
1980 meeting with President Carter’s religious liaison Dr. Robert L. Maddox, Jr. had led
to lasting organization. This gathering, however, yielded the North American Lesbian and
311 Lewis H. Arends, Jr., “Christianity vs. Sexual Preference: Theologian Says Church Recognizing Some People have ‘Calling’ to Gay Lifestyle,” Statesman-Journal, Salem Oregon, Sunday, July 18, 1982, 4C. 312 Ibid. 313 Ibid. 314 “Black Editor to Speak on Gay Rights,” Portland Skanner, June 23, 1982. James Tinney Papers. 315 Fr. Bob Nugent, “Gay Christians Meet in Washington, DC,” The Advocate, June 24, 1982. James Tinney Papers.
144 Gay Religious Congress. Interestingly, one group nearly pulled out of the new organization over membership requirements, and some objected to use of the words
“American” and “Christian.” The group decided to maintain an interim Christian identity but intended to move toward an interfaith focus—an acknowledgment of the prior exclusion of Jews from full participation. Participants criticized the gay and lesbian press for its condescension toward Christian groups and their activities and were urged to monitor the local gay press and report any concerns at the upcoming gay press association meeting held in Denver. Participating affirming Christian groups included:
Affirmation (United Methodists), Axios (Eastern and Orthodox), Brethren/Mennonite
Council for Gay Concerns, Dignity, Inc. (Roman Catholic), Integrity (Episcopalian), Los
Angeles Gay/Lesbian Religious Coalition, Lutherans Concerned/North America, New
Ways Ministry (a Roman Catholic gay ministry group), Pentecostal Coalition for Human
Rights, Presbyterians for Lesbian/Gay Concerns, Seventh Day Adventist Kinship,
International, Inc., Southern Baptists (unofficial), Unitarian Universalist Office of
Lesbian/Gay Concerns, United Church Coalition for Lesbian/Gay Concerns, and
UFMCC.316
Emboldened by these events, Tinney placed an ad in the Washington Post to announce the “gay revival” he planned to hold September 1–4, 1982, at All Souls Church in Washington, DC. An article in the Pentecostal Evangel quoted at length a letter Tinney distributed prior to the revival: “[f]or the first time in an open, visible public place, God is going to show ‘signs’ to the ‘straight’ heterosexist churches that we who are lesbian/gay have been accepted and exonerated by God. . . . In this way, God will prove to us and to
316 Ibid.
145 others that we are just as much Christians as those who preach legalistic, Victorian rules
about sex and pleasure and the human body.”317 The revival finally forced the hand of the
leadership at his home church, Temple Church of God in Christ in Columbia Heights.
Tinney was excommunicated by his pastor Bishop Samuel Kelsey on August 29, 1982,
three days before “the gay revival.”318 But the national, denominational opprobrium was
merely the public counterpart to what Tinney described as years of private interpersonal
and intercongregational struggle.
Tinney continued to critique conservative evangelicalism. As part of the week-
long institute at Shiloh Baptist Church, Surrendering All: The Purest Form of Knowing
(referencing Romans 12:2), Tinney taught, “A Close Look at Born-Again Politics and
Right-Wing Religions.”319 Gay publications reported on the backlash Tinney faced as a
result of his assertion of an affirming Christianity. Body Politic and the Advocate
denounced the church’s rebuke of “the pro-gay stance of gay Howard University
professor James S. Tinney who leads the Pentecostal Coalition for Human Rights
(PCHR).”320 The nonaffirming Logos Journal called on the church to expel “faculty advisor James Tinney” for his role in forming the Pentecostal Coalition for Human
Rights in Washington, DC. Tinney’s determination to connect oppressions was rejected when members of Ohio University’s gospel choir interrupted Tinney’s sermon, “The
Gospel and Oppression,” during which he tried to convince listeners that Christianity had
317 “Tinney Excommunicated for Leadership in Homosexual Concerns, Post Reports,” Pentecostal Evangel, December 1982. James Tinney Papers. 318 Brad Green, “Gay Revival Leads to Excommunication,” Washington Blade, September 10, 1982, 3. Details of Tinney’s excommunication were also published in The Washington Times (September 1982), The Weekly News (Miami Florida, September 29, 1982), and The Pentecostal Evangel (December 5, 1982). 319 Juanita Hayes, “15-Course Institute at Shiloh Baptist,” November 15, 1980. James Tinney Papers. 320 “The World: Black Gay Evangelist Attacked by Church,” Body Politic 75 (Jul/Aug 1981), 17; “Pentecostal Journal Rebukes Its Own Gays,” Advocate 320 (June 25, 1981), 10.
146 become a “tool for the oppression of Blacks, women, and Gays by serving as an
ideological justification for white male rule.”321 As several students walked out, one
student stood in the center aisle shouting at Tinney: “My Bible tells me that all
homosexuals and adulterers and fornicators shall have their part in the lake of fire!”322
This incident also evidences a blind spot in Tinney’s self-making project: he failed to consider the fierceness with which the conservative contingent of black Christians held on to heteronormativity because its value in navigating their own experiences of racism.
The indignant choir member took pride in a patriarchal, heterosexist iteration of black
Christianity that Tinney’s sermon threatened to adulterate. In this instance, his knowledge of black culture may have been secondary to his own political agenda, namely the advance of gay-affirming, black Christianity. Tinney eventually resumed his sermon on
the distortion of the gospel as a means by which to “ensure the dominance of straight
white males over all the rest of God’s creation.”323
In addition to guest lectures and sermons, Tinney continued to believe that
prophetic black Christianity had the power to advance the cause of gay rights. As guest
editor of Insight: A Journal of L/G Thought, Tinney wrote: “For too long our silence as
Black lesbians and gay men has contributed to the lie that gay liberation is a ‘white issue.’ We have known better for all our lives. […] But we have also come to realize that we are the church; and that Black lesbians and gays have as much right and authority to speak for the Black church as do heterosexual Christians. We have been in the pews and pulpits and kitchens and boardrooms ever since the beginning of this grand
321 “Theologian Brews Ohio Controversy,” Washington Blade, June 26, 1981. 322 Ibid. 323 Ibid.
147 institution.”324 His argument was echoed by Reverend Renee McCoy, an African
American lesbian who founded Metropolitan Community Church in Harlem, New York.
McCoy contributed an essay to Insight that criticized homophobic black churches: “the
black church is homophobic. If black lesbians and gay men are willing to check their
sexuality at the door of the church, and come bearing gifts of talent, they may be
accepted. But others are given the option to change or leave.”325 Tinney proclaimed that
he and the other authors of the special edition of Insight stood “as a proud new generation
of persons who are as unashamedly lesbian and gay as we are Christian. Your acceptance
or rejection of us amounts to only an after-thought; we are already living in the full
beauty of God’s thought and affirmation.”326
The fact that nonaffirming ministries often admitted that prayer and counseling
did not transform individuals attracted to the same sex into heterosexuals led Tinney to
admonish fellow Christians: “To continue to use such terms as ‘deliverance’ and ‘cure’ in
reference to constant volitional suppression of one’s own self and own desires is
intellectually dishonest, theologically absurd and terribly misleading to both the gays and
the other members of our churches. […] If [others] are led to doubt promises of healing
and deliverance, then they may also doubt promises of forgiveness and grace and eternal
life.”327 The notion that “homosexuals” existed only outside of churches facilitated a
callous theology. Tinney claimed that the church should stop identifying people as gay
324 James S. Tinney, “Editorial,” Insight: A Quarterly of Lesbian/Gay Christian Opinion (Black, Christian and Gay, guest editor James S. Tinney) 4, no. 4 (1981): 3. 325 Renee McCoy, “We are Exiles from Our Own Communities,” Insight: A Quarterly of Lesbian/Gay Christian Opinion (Black, Christian and Gay, guest editor James S. Tinney) 4, no. 4 (1981): 3; “The Failure of the Black Church,” Blacklight 3, no. 4 (1982). 326 Ibid.; William F. Willoughby, The Washington Times Magazine, July 2, 1982. 327 Tinney, “Homosexuality as a Pentecostal Phenomenon,” 52.
148 and instead develop a theology of sexuality. As it stood, “gay” individuals were trapped
in a spiritual Sisyphean enterprise that precluded “deliverance” in any form. Tinney
claimed that “denying that one is an invert in the face of continuing desires produces only
greater psychological distress among the truly repentant.”328 Pointing a finger at leaders
and laity, he said homosexual Christians only became an issue for other church members
when scandal threatened prevailing religious dogma—a charge he later supported with
details of his own experience: “It was the Pentecostal church which furnished me with the
only two lovers I ever had—one a minister and one a lay member. Each of these
relationships [was monogamous] and each lasted about two years. . . . The [church]
members, of course, knew what was going on. . . . Perhaps because we did not flaunt our
relationship by displaying overt affection at church meetings, we were able to feel
accepted, loved, and even honored for our faithfulness to the church.”329
Tinney’s description of gay lovers within a homophobic church reinterprets
worship and ministry as “place-making practices” and the spiritual intimacy shared with
other congregants, as queer time—an adumbration of Judith Halberstam’s concepts of
queer time and queer space. Halberstam defines queer time as: “specific models of
temporality that emerge within postmodernism once one leaves the temporal frames of
bourgeois reproduction and family, longevity, risk/safety, and inheritance.”330 In Times
Square Red, Times Square Blue, Samuel R. Delaney’s reflections on the interactions
between men of different classes and races in New York porn shops and theatres attends
328 Ibid., 53. 329 Tinney, “Struggles of a Black Pentecostal,” 171. 330 Judith Halberstam, In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives (New York: New York University, 2005), 6.
149 to spaces where interclass contact can occur. In turn, Judith Halberstam reads Delaney to
illustrate the concept of “queer space [as] the place-making practices within postmodernism in which queer people engage and . . . the new understandings of space enabled by the production of queer counterpublics.”331 If specific practices create queer
space, insofar as affirming Christians learn and practice their faith in conservative
churches, they call attention to the way worship not only mitigates difference but also
creates Christian communities. As such, affirming Christians who belong to nonaffirming
churches disprove the notion that Christians and queers are always and only separate
communities. Rather, they show that conservative churches validate the faith of the queer
subject, even as they concomitantly deny the validity of queer sexuality. For figures such
as Tinney, the validation of his faith yielded a powerful sense of righteousness—in the
sense of being free from sin or guilt as a result of being in harmony with spiritual or
moral law—that emboldened his demands for social equality. Without question, religion
is a disciplinary technology through which bourgeois sexual and social norms are
communicated and enforced, but it also “offered common people, especially the poor,
compelling visions of individual self-respect and collective self-confidence.”332
Tinney argued that prohibitions against homosexuality should be jettisoned
because of the ubiquity of lesbians and gays. The presence of black lesbians and gays in
the “pews and pulpits and kitchens and boardrooms” of the so-called black church was
important to Tinney for three reasons. First, the church had been a driving force in efforts
to end legal racial segregation since Emancipation. Second, Tinney wanted to prove that
331 Ibid. 332 Hatch, American Christianity, 4. See also Heyrman, Southern Cross.
150 the churches’ antigay position did not make sense because black LGBT Christians were
already part of those faith communities. Third, Tinney believed that if he could “pass” as
a gay member and minister of the black church then the end of legal segregation might
also signal the advent of gay equality.
On April 11, 1982, James Tinney arrived in Houston, Texas, “from the midst of
battle” to deliver the keynote address “to the 10th International General Conference of the
Universal Fellowship of Metropolitan Community Churches (UFMCC) in Houston,
Texas.”333 Mainstream Pentecostals had begun to turn on Tinney because his gay
activism, which had begun years earlier, had become impossible to ignore. The national
gay magazine Advocate reported that “Logos Journal, the leading American Pentecostal
magazine, has called on the church to expel Dr. James Tinney for his role in forming the
Pentecostal Coalition for Human Rights.”334 Tinney explained to the UFMCC
congregation that the church had taught him to “deny my most inherent self […]
penitently grovel in the floor every time I thought about sex, and spend sleepless nights in
fear that I might die and go to hell.”335 As part of the litany of injuries inflicted upon him
by homophobic friends and family he lamented: “I have been told by a trusted friend that
homosexuality is most rampant among persons who are either extremely light or
extremely dark in complexion, as if both light-skin and gayness were twin symptoms of some physical plague or innate deficiency.”336 Before the crowd of hundreds of MCCers
of all races, Tinney was careful not to explicitly mention his blackness. But the reference
333 James S. Tinney, “The Tasks God is Calling the Metropolitan Community Churches to Perform: An Address to the 10th International General Conference of the Universal Fellowship of Metropolitan Community Churches,” The Gay Christian, Second Quarter, 1982, 6–9. 334 “Pentecostal Journal Rebukes Its Own.” 335 Tinney, “The Tasks God is Calling,” 6–9. 336 Ibid.
151 to “complexion” would have been understood as a reference to intraracial colorism by
African Americans and anyone familiar with black culture. Further, in “Struggles of a
Black Pentecostal” (1983), Tinney claims that he had been ostracized as a child because
he was so light-skinned. He also shores up his claim to black identity by paying tribute to
“the sense of history and heritage which my grandmother (a proud Black woman who had
taught school when no one else was available, just to keep the doors of a one-room Black schoolhouse open) passed on to me.”337
As Anthea Butler noted in her presidential address to the Society for Pentecostal
Studies, James Tinney was erased from the conservative African American community despite his many contributions as well as his obvious determination to be fully acknowledged by his Christian and academic peers: “When he declared his homosexuality and came roaring out of the closet, he still attended SPS meetings. He argued, as I hear tell, with many of you here in this room. And he was a member of the
Society for Pentecostal Studies, even though he had been defrocked, started a gay church, and even tried to put up a table, among our vendors, with information about being gay and Christian.”338 More than applaud his tenacity, Butler used Tinney as an example of
those like him, Dr. James Forbes, and others, who once “brought something to the
discourse that was vital, challenging and intellectually stimulating” to Pentecostalism but
who had left SPS whether due to “disinterest, disillusionment or death.”339 As Anthea
Butler’s account suggests, once he became clear about his position he was not swayed by
337 Tinney, “Struggles of a Black Pentecostal,” 167. 338 Anthea Butler, “Presidential Address: Pentecostal Traditions We Should Pass On: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly,” Pneuma: The Journal of the Society for Pentecostal Studies 27, no. 2 (2005). 339 Ibid.
152 others’ disapproval.
Tinney wrote and spoke extensively about black Pentecostalism as a way to
garner support from the black church he joined. Initially, church leaders and laity
applauded his scholarly attention to the Church of God in Christ. Others in the
denomination who held doctorates contributed to the journal and served on the board of
advisors. By the 1980s, however, he had learned that becoming part of the black
community held no guarantee of full acceptance, particularly the black church
community. Writing as a black man, he lamented: “[…] Black lesbians and gays have as
much right and authority to speak for the Black church as do heterosexual Christians. We
have been in the pews and pulpits and kitchens and boardrooms ever since the beginning
of this grand institution. Without us, the Black church would not be what it is today.”340
Conclusion
When James Tinney died of AIDS in 1988, he was mourned by members of
Washington, DC’s African American, lesbian and gay, and Christian communities. The
project he had begun nearly twenty years earlier evidenced faith that the so-called Black
church had the power to make what was then termed “the homosexual” legible within
existing Christian and political discourse. Although surviving friends and congregants continue to debate whether his claims to black identity were ever intended to deceive, they agree that his commitment to social justice is indisputable.341
340 Tinney, “Editorial.” 341 In 2012, the author was privy to a heated email exchange regarding whether Tinney had deceived those who knew and loved him. The debate occurred in the weeks before friend and church deacon Michael Vanzant dedicated the papers of Tinney’s church, Faith Temple, to the Washington Historical Society. Faith Temple is the first LGBT church to donate its papers there and the dedication ceremony was held September 15, 2012, at the Martin Luther King, Jr. Library in Washington, DC.
153 Like many Americans, Tinney witnessed the black civil rights movement
effectively use religion to counter racist characterization of African Americans and to
buttress demands for legal equality. As a Christian, he believed in the power of faith in
God to disambiguate blackness and abjection. He therefore understood Christian identity
as a condition for establishing gay subjectivity and black Christian Identity as a means by
which to advance recognition of LGBT Americans within the beloved community.
Tinney’s vision for a black church movement in support of lesbians and gays was
thwarted by the complexities that romantic narratives of the civil rights era elide. There
was no single black community, no single way of being black, and no single black church
to which one could appeal. Perhaps most strikingly, there was no single way to capture
the diversity of black American politics in the post-King era of civil rights. In the words of historian David Chappell:
There is no heroic narrative of those post-King years to match the narrative that unfolded in the King years: no tendency of the plot to run from dramatic show- down in the streets to redemptive national legislation. There is no pattern of exposing evils leading to crisis leading to remedial steps. [. . .] The story of the continuing struggle for rights and equality after 1968 is central to the meaning of freedom in America [because it reiterates] the contradiction that [has] haunted American history from the start: The degradation and deprivation of an entire “race” of people exaggerated the freedom of white Americans while exposing America’s hypocrisy to the world.342
In the wake of mass civil rights and antiwar demonstrations and the rise of second wave
feminism, Americans of all races were compelled to account for the way personal
identity—including Christian and moral beliefs—intersects with political identity. No longer divided exclusively along racial or denominational lines, Americans began to organize themselves to effect social change. Religion was one site where dynamic shifts
342 Chappell, Waking from the Dream, xi, xiii.
154 had become apparent, in what scholar Robert Wuthnow describes as “the nuts and bolts
of social interaction [including] symbolism, ritual acts, gestures, discourse, moral
obligations, commitments—all the things we usually think of as being important when
we speak of religion.”343 Tinney’s simultaneous performance of the “nuts and bolts” of
blackness and of Pentecostalism is important for the way it reveals identity as both
interpellation (our response to how others see us) and performance (our creative
engagement with the cultural and political context in which we live).
From 1968 until the end of the first decade of the AIDS epidemic, Tinney, Perry,
and other gay-affirming Christians imagined themselves as foot soldiers in a war for
equality. Social and legal antigay violence was often justified through appeals to
Christian belief. Yet, churches and hymns also mobilized activists to create a kind of
“politicized righteousness” at the intersection of church culture and American civil
religion, therefore gay-affirming Christians were inspired to link faith and politics.
Tinney saw in the expressive black church tradition new language for self-acceptance and
righteous resistance against every kind of bigotry. By establishing himself as a scholar of
Black political movements, including religion and sexuality, he moved from
identification to identity. Identifying as a black gay Pentecostal gave Tinney the authority
to narrate his life in social justice terms through black Christian Identity and he was not
unique in trying to wrest the pleasure of self-affirmation from the performance of particular identities. The 1970s’ shibboleths “Black is Beautiful,” “Gay is Good,” and even “Jesus Freak” represent efforts to positively recast blackness, homosexuality, and
Christian fervor. These performative speech-acts rehabilitated stigmatized identities in
343 Wuthnow, The Restructuring of American Religion, 9–10.
155 the minds of both speaker and hearer.
Tinney’s life calls attention to the intersection of social movements for black civil
rights and LGBT equality and how Christian conceptions of suffering and justice
informed each. His work as a scholar, activist, and pastor indicates that the gospel of gay
liberation was predicated on the cultural intelligibility of antiblack violence, the black
church, and the end of legal segregation. Attention to the role of religion in the LGBT
social movement productively complicates existing scholarship on black and LGBT
religiosity by transcending well-worn debates over whether Christianity is “conservative
or liberal” and whether the faith of marginalized Americans constitutes “assimilation or
resistance.” Tinney’s reconciliation of his sexuality and spirituality involved
appropriation of black Christian identity in support of gay liberation. It also made explicit
that we all grope for ways to make sense of experiences of otherness and oppression and
that the means by which we make those experiences intelligible to others are often
fraught with complexity.
Using his faith to reinvent himself, Tinney demonstrated that the profession and
performance of faith is not simply a matter of private religious belief. Rather, believers
use their faith to impact the time in which they live. The following chapter builds on
James Tinney’s identity project by shifting to analysis of Christian identity as deployed to oppose gay rights. As the previous chapters have shown, Christian identity is a social construction that its adherents use to assert an essential moral identity, as a strategy to achieve or maintain the vision of society that comports with their Christian ideals. In the following chapter, Christianity, like American civil religion, is presumed universal, but its lived significance remains deeply reflective of the racial and sexual history of the
156 United States.
157 Chapter 4: “The Homosexual Explosion” in The Body of Christ: Race, Conservative Christian Identity and Resistance to Gay Rights
Everywhere I turned, newspapers, television and many individuals bombarded me with the realization that America is experiencing a homosexual epidemic. —Tim LaHaye, 1978344
We call upon this nation to return to the dream of our Founding Fathers. . . . to repent of conduct contrary to the purposes for which it was founded and the clear commandment of the Word of God. . . . There is adultery, rape, fornication, homosexuality and filthiness of mind throughout the land. —One Nation Under God, Washington for Jesus 1980 Planning Committee345
Puerto Rican Pentecostal Pastor, John Gimenez founded the nonprofit One Nation
Under God to support planning and administration of Washington for Jesus, a national, multiracial, conservative evangelical rally; the event was Gimenez’s idea to call
Christians together to repent for the nation’s moral decline and to pray for God’s forgiveness and healing. He enlisted prominent white evangelicals to lead the
Washington for Jesus steering committee. Under the leadership of co-chairs Reverend Pat
Robertson and Reverend Bill Bright, the steering committee published the document,
cited above, in newsletters and newspapers across the United States to invite Christians to
descend on the National Mall for a time of corporate repentance and prayer, April 28–29,
1980. Another reason Gimenez, Robertson, and Bright wanted to change the political and
religious landscape was that the Christianity of President Jimmy Carter had created a
moment of identitarian crisis for the evangelicals who had voted for him. Conservative
344 Tim LaHaye, The Unhappy Gays: What Everyone Should Know about Homosexuality, Wheaton: Tyndale Publishing House, 1978: 8. 345 “A Christian Declaration,” was published in Flame, the newsletter of Reverend Pat Robertson’s 700 Club.
158 evangelicals had presumed that his faith mapped onto theirs: antigay, antichoice, and
unapologetically patriarchal. Instead, Carter’s relatively progressive faith oriented him
more toward trying to understand others unlike himself, than imposing a prohibitive set
of religious standards
The decade prior to Washington for Jesus had troubled conservative evangelical
Christians of all races. They believed that gay rights, feminism, non- and extra-marital sex, and divorce were evidence of moral decline.346 Christianity Today noted that the
United Methodist, United Presbyterian, and Episcopal churches had been embroiled in
dates over “pro-homosexual positions” including ordination. In a January 1980 reflection
on the previous decade, they warned that, even though they had experienced setbacks,
“avowed homosexuals . . . gained greater visibility, and they can be expected to press their causes with increased vigor in the years ahead.”347 White evangelicals such as
Reverend Bright were deeply troubled by the threat of Communism as well as the Iran
Hostage Crisis, which they perceived as an admonition, an ominous expression of God’s
displeasure and possibly His vengeance if the nation continued its course. Reverend
Bright warned that a supernatural act of God was needed to protect America from losing
its freedom to “a foreign power.”348
Gay rights activism particularly offended black conservative Christians, who
346 Extra-marital sex refers to sex outside the bonds of marriage, but the term presumes marriage, particularly heterosexual, monogamous marriage as normative. Nonmarital sex is added here because it references the sexual activity of those who neither aspire to conceptions of marriage, nor deviate from it as a relational ideal. 347 “Gaining Perspective after a Decade of Change,” Christianity Today, January 4, 1980, http://proxygw.wrlc.org/login?url=https://search-proquest- com.proxygw.wrlc.org/docview/2006632185?accountid=11243 (accessed July 28, 2018). 348 “A 700 Club Special! Washington for Jesus 1980,” You Tube video, 57:48, March 28, 2017. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hnUmpCwBJs8
159 resented white gays’ claims that the black civil rights and gay rights movements were
analogous. The “like race” gay rights analogy imagined black people, and particularly
black Christians, as a monolith and the history of black civil rights as one that paved the
way to history of LGBT equality. The presumption of black political uniformity
effectively erased not only black political diversity as well as black LGBT people of faith
in the gay rights movement who, admittedly, were less visible than white gays and
lesbians. Still, contrary to popular perception, most black churches had not participated in
the civil rights movement. Martin Luther King, Jr. had been ousted from his
denomination, the five million-member National Baptist Convention (NBC), after he and
other pro–civil rights ministers failed to unseat then-president Reverend Joseph H.
Jackson, an outspoken advocate of “law and order,” in 1961.349 A supporter of Richard
Nixon, Jackson denounced the civil rights movement as divisive: “No matter how non-
violent, civil disobedience lays the ground for civil hatred and the desire to destroy.”350
Like Reverend Jerry Falwell and other white Christian segregationists, black ministers
such as Jackson had preached that the church should focus on the things of God rather
than worldly matters such as politics. Some black Christian conservatives felt their own
tenuous grasp on civil rights threatened when gay rights activists equated racial oppression and the oppression of gays and lesbians and responded by trying to explain same-sex desire as a sinful condition rather than an identity. In 1974, Elder Charles
Edward Blake of the Church of God in Christ argued that homosexuality was a sin, and
349 For more on King’s frustration with other black ministers, see: Martin Luther King, Jr., Stride Toward Freedom: The Montgomery Story (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1958); Branch, Parting the Waters, 101- 102; Lawrence H. Williams, “The Progressive National Baptist Convention,” Baptist History and Heritage, Winter 2005, 24-33. 350 Joseph H. Jackson, “The Meaning of the Cross,” Time Magazine 95, no. 14 (April 6, 1970), 74.
160 that sin alienated men from God and themselves, which caused “their relationships with
one another to become perverted.”351 Despite the growing number of gay and lesbian
Christians of all races in Troy Perry’s MCC and “gay caucuses” among American
Baptists, Catholics, Episcopalians, Quakers, Methodists, Presbyterians, Blake and other
antigay Christians simply refused to acknowledge their LGBT siblings who believed in
Jesus Christ. Instead, that refusal paved the way for conservative Christians to create and
maintain a gay/Christian binary that denied sexual diversity in America’s churches.
In 1978, white conservative evangelical Tim LaHaye, co-author of the popular
Left Behind series, articulated that indignation in the guidebook The Unhappy Gays:
What Everyone Should Know about Homosexuality.352 After teaching “family life
seminars” on heterosexual marriage and sexuality in forty-two countries around the
world, LaHaye and his wife Beverly were stunned by what he called “the homosexual
explosion” upon returning to their home in San Diego, California.353 The most unlikely
people seemed to be coming out as gay and demanding equal rights: the husband of a
church member, a ten-year veteran of the San Diego Police Department, and even NFL
football star David Kopay.354 Soon thereafter, LaHaye attended an interview of Anita
Bryant after her antigay campaign facilitated repeal of the Miami-Dade County antidiscrimination bill. He was appalled by the heavy security required to ensure her
351 Blake is now the Presiding Prelate of the Church of God in Christ, which was James Tinney’s denomination. Charles E. Blake, “Is There Hope for the Homosexual?” The Whole Truth, Vol. VII, No. V, June 1974, 7. 352 Left Behind is a popular series of sixteen best-selling prophetic fiction novels and four major films. The series is a literary form of evangelical witness in that it warns against the evils of modernity, encourages Christians’ civic responsibility, and preaches the importance of personal salvation. For more on the history of such fiction, and interesting analysis of the role of racism in it, see: Crawford Gribben, Writing the Rapture: Prophecy Fiction in Evangelical America (New York, NY: Oxford, 2009). 353 LaHaye, The Unhappy Gays, 8. 354 Ibid.
161 protection from the gathering of “angry gays” shouting “God Loves Gays Too, Anita!” and “Gay is Good!” and he recounted similar demonstrations by gays in Miami, New
York, and San Francisco.355
LaHaye began writing the guidebook after his friend and editor Wendell Hawley, of the Christian Tyndale Publishing House, asked LaHaye to provide the Christian community “a penetrating book on homosexuality.”356 The book provided an overview of the work of Sigmund Freud, Havelock Ellis, and Alfred Kinsey, who he believed responsible for the explosion, and instructed Christians against the kinds of parenting that
“produced” homosexuals, particularly the effeminizing effect of “smother mothers.”357
LaHaye assured readers that although historians Arnold Toynbee and Edward Gibbons affirmed that homosexual behavior led to the decline of civilizations, homosexuality itself was nothing new. Indeed, the story of Sodom and Gomorrah in the book of Genesis set the precedent for conservatives’ condemnation of gays. Most importantly, he offered strategies for helping people “overcome” homosexuality, denounced LGBT Christianity, and promised that, “contrary to popular homosexual teachings, such feelings, thoughts and actions are reversible!”358
Other conservative evangelicals were crasser. In a February 1979 broadcast, conservative evangelical Reverend James Robison of Texas criticized the use of the word
“gay [to refer] to anything as despicable as the homosexual movement.”359 Robison had recently been cancelled by a Dallas television station for saying that the gay rights
355 Ibid., 7. 356 Ibid. 357 Ibid., 72. 358 Ibid., 92. 359 David Wilson, “FCC Rules against Fundamentalist Preacher,” Washington Blade 4, April 3, 1980.
162 movement represented a “perversion of the highest order,” that the murders of San
Francisco Mayor George Moscone and Supervisor Harvey Milk were evidence of God’s
condemnation, and that gay men recruited and murdered children.360 In response,
Robison claimed that he was being persecuted for simply preaching the word of God.361
Television station WFAA responded that the problem was not that Robison cited the first
chapter of the book of Romans but that he then “blamed homosexuals for crimes ranging
from sexual molestation to murder.”362 Conservative evangelical Christians such as
Robison and LaHaye rejected and pathologized gay and lesbian Christians in advance of the first National March for Lesbian and Gay Rights, which was held October 14, 1979.
Conservative evangelicals of color and white evangelicals both interpreted gay rights as a threat to their way of life and in righteous indignation joined forces as the “body of
Christ.”
This chapter turns attention to Christian Identity as a powerful modifier in the broader faith-based fight against gay rights. As the previous two chapters have shown, gay-affirming Christians claimed that they too held deep Christian conviction and that they were indeed Christians, no more and no less than their conservative, heterosexual siblings in Christ. LGBT Christians made sense of their right to political equality by connecting faith and the black civil rights struggle.
The tacit argument of right-wing Christian activism was that the limits of
“normal” Americans’ commitment to equality had been tested by a surfeit of civil rights movements. Women’s liberation, threats to end tax-exemption for racially segregated
360 “Man of God Preaches Murder,” Washington Blade, March 29, 1979, 16. 361 “Evangelist Fights Cancellation of TV Show,” New York Times, April 1, 1979. 362 Ibid.
163 Christian schools, Roe v. Wade, and the gay rights movement caused conservative evangelicals to mobilize around a religious agenda based on moral and political conservatism. “The body of Christ” became a metaphor of spiritual uniformity that muted racial difference in order to disambiguate opposition to gay rights and racism. In so doing, conservative evangelical Christianity became a “color-blind gospel,” the religious equivalent of Republican “color-blind conservatism.” This shift was a strategic effort to distance conservative religion and politics from the morally repugnant displays of antiblack violence, which civil rights activism had revealed. In 1968, for example, white conservative evangelicals had assembled election guides, such as “The Bible and
National Affairs,” that provided scriptural guidance on political issues.363 Their emphasis on faith and simultaneous inattention to race had facilitated a “color-blind doctrine [that] was tied together by a weave of political calculations and genuine sentiments for change.
Attached to a broader strategy by the GOP to win the South and the nation’s Silent
Majority, the race-neutral ideology offered a softer social plank without entertaining the race-baiting of throwback candidates like George Wallace.”364 At the end of the 1960s, political conservatives such as Ronald Reagan had argued that the only racial reform
America needed was through interpersonal relationships because they believed federal civil rights legislation had remedied the effects of systemic racism and consequent generational poverty. Proponents of this brand of conservativism had equated Jim Crow reactionaries with civil rights activists, by arguing that talking about racism led to its perpetuation. Yet, refusing to talk about race does not dismantle the effects of racism. As
363 Dochuk, From Bible Belt to Sun Belt, 273. 364 Ibid., 274.
164 scholarship on the effect of color-blindness in the law have shown, the US Supreme
Court thwarts equal representation for people of color and maintains legal and economic
advantages for whites by claiming color-blind adherence to the US Constitution. In the words of critical race scholar, Ian Haney Lopez, “here is the perversity of color-
blindness—to banish race-words redoubles the hegemony of race by targeting efforts to
combat racism while leaving race and the effects unchallenged and embedded in
society.”365 This chapter will show that conservative evangelical Christianity was a color-
blind narrative. It equipped believers of color to subordinate experiences of difference,
including oppression, to their faith and identity in Jesus Christ. At the same time, it
equipped white conservative evangelicals to continue to endorse norms, behaviors,
perspectives, and even histories that maintain racial hierarchy as Christian belief and
practice.
Conservative Christian identity is as socially constructed as race, gender, and
sexuality, although it has largely escaped analysis in studies of identity, as well as
critiques of identity politics. As this chapter will demonstrate, conservative Christian
identity was used to argue that prejudices—such as those of LaHaye and Robison—
actually constituted expression of sincere religious belief. Across lines of race and class,
evangelicals emphasized conversion, biblical authority, witnessing—or sharing the faith
through word or action—and, centrally, the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus Christ.
What was remarkable about the conservative Christian evangelical movement, popularly
known as the Religious Right, is that it mobilized believers of different races and
365 Ian Haney Lopez, White By Law: The Legal Constitution of Race (New York: New York University, 1996), 177.
165 denominations who variously endorsed faith-based homophobia, resistance to the
federally mandated desegregation of Christian schools, biblical defense of patriarchy, and
opposition to extending the rights and privileges of citizenship to gays and lesbians. Yet,
as Mark Noll argues, “evangelicalism has always been made up of shifting movements,
temporary alliances, and the lengthened shadows of individuals. All discussions of
evangelicalism, therefore, are always both descriptive of the way things really are as well
as efforts within our own minds to provide some order for a multifaceted, complex set of
impulses and organizations.”366 Therefore, the rise of conservative evangelicalism was
constituted by the convergence of Christian segregationists, fundamentalists, conservative
mainline Christians who supported or were indifferent to the fight for racial equality,
Christians who interpreted the Bible literally, those who interpreted it metaphorically and
those who believed that God was also speaking through people such as James Robison
and John Gimenez. In other words, conservative evangelical Christianity was a strategic
hodgepodge of disparate Christian doctrines and political agendas made coherent by the
fact that religious freedom, including the freedom to identify as Christian, is taken for
granted as a political ideal. As such, conservatives were empowered to use the political
assertion of Christian identity to reframe support for public policies that reinforced race,
gender, and sexual inequality as an expression of sincere Christian belief and
commitment. In so doing, they erased ways that Christians had used their faith to justify
and perpetuate racism, sexism, and anti-homosexual animus in the past two decades
alone.
366 Mark A. Noll, The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind, (Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing, 1994), 8.
166 Studies of the black civil rights movement, and the Religious Right movement
that followed it, have worked to explain the political impact of religious conviction at the
end of the twentieth century. Academic and popular explanations of the political activism
of evangelicals too often assert Christian convictions as the ultimate explanation for
conservatism. This tendency misses not only the way evangelical religion motivates
progressive evangelicals, but that evangelicalism is first and foremost a way of
participating in the cultural dominance of Christianity. This fact does not negate the
sincerity of those who profess it as the guiding system of belief in their lives, but it does
call attention to the strategic essentialism of conservative Christians in and beyond the
Religious Right.
The chapter argues that, as members of the body of Christ, conservative
Christians claimed that Christians shared a common identity in order to police the
boundaries of human sexuality and to reject LGBT Christians. Further, those efforts to
police the bounds of Christian identity revealed its instability. Rather than undermining
sincerity or authenticity of either, the cultural conflict between gay-affirming and antigay
Christians indicates that Christian identity references no single moral position. Similar to
David Halperin’s definition of the word queer, Christianity derives its meaning from the
dominant or normative condition that its believers seek to achieve:
Unlike gay identity, . . . queer identity need not be grounded in any positive truth or in any stable reality. As the very word implies, “queer” . . . acquires its meaning from its oppositional relation to the norm. Queer is by definition whatever is at odds with the normal, the legitimate, the dominant. There is nothing in particular to which it necessarily refers. It is an identity without an essence. “Queer,” then, demarcates not a positivity but a positionality vis-á-vis the normative—a positionality that is not restricted to lesbians and gay men but . . . available to everyone who is or feels marginalized because of her or his sexual
167 practices: it could include some married couples without children. . . .”367
Ultimately, the political uses of Christianity suggest that the tradition has no single definition, doctrine, or political commitment. Rather, its meaning must be endlessly reiterated by believers because the multiplicity of doctrines and denominations, styles of worship, and political positions in the late twentieth century alone reveal it to be a faith of indeterminate meaning, one easily coopted by champions and enemies of justice.
The indeterminateness of the meaning of Christian identity might be read as an effect of changes in American culture. Religion scholar Robert Wuthnow argued that after the 1950s, Americans began to eschew denominationalism in favor of special interest groups fueled by cultural understandings of what it means to be religious.368
Hundreds of thousands of conservative evangelical Christians gathered on the National
Mall to pray because civil rights, women’s rights, and gay rights movements troubled static notions of race, gender, and sexuality. Moreover, faith-based support for those movements posed serious challenges to claims that social inequality was divinely ordained. Therefore, the chapter is less concerned with how antigay Christians understood their private, personal relationship to God than “with the public dimensions of religious culture in the United States: the utterances, and acts of religious leaders, the aggregate categories into which individuals define themselves religiously, and the ways in which religious bodies enter into public discourse on matters, for example, of collective value, politics, and economics.”369
The first section establishes Christian Identity politics in the ministries of white
367 David M. Halperin, Saint Foucault: Towards a Gay Hagiography (New York: Oxford, 1995), 62. 368 Wuthnow, The Restructuring of American Religion.. 369 Ibid., 10.
168 conservative Christians, Reverend Jerry Falwell, Anita Bryant, and Carl McIntire. It
demonstrates shifts and continuities in the construction of Christian identity before and
after the black civil rights movement and the emergence of a purportedly color-blind conservative Christianity. The next section examines the leadership and participation of conservative evangelical Christians of color in the conservative evangelical politics and their leadership in the 1980 Washington for Jesus Rally. Occurring less than six months after the first March on Washington for Lesbian and Gay Rights in 1979, Washington for
Jesus (WFJ) was the beginning of several major national rallies that explicitly linked patriotism and Christian morality. Whereas LGBT Christians were working to expand
Christian conceptions of sexuality, conservative Christians of all races were rallying around heterosexuality, patriarchy, and nuclear families.370 The chapter concludes that
the gay rights struggle demands more scholarship on Christian identity as it intersects
with historically specific conceptions of race, gender, and sexuality. As the next section
will detail, antigay conservative evangelicals used Christian identity to mobilize like-
minded believers, thereby demonstrating what Wuthnow described as “the cultural
dimensions of American religion.”371
Creating a Color-Blind Christian Conservativism
Scholars of the Religious Right have tended to focus on explaining why the
movement led by national figures such as Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson and locally by
370 Reverend Jerry Falwell began holding “I Love America” rallies across the United States in 1979. Washington for Jesus Rallies were held in 1988, 1996, and 2004. 371 Wuthnow, The Restructuring of American Religion, 10.
169 blue- and white-collar people of faith happened, specifically, in the 1980s.372 I argue here
that rise of the Religious Right was simply another form of identity politics, as
denominational divisions among conservative Christians became less important than
winning the “culture wars” against feminism, gay rights, and other progressive issues.
Opponents of progressive politics came together under a new Christian Identity that
colluded with what literary theorist Lauren Berlant termed, “the reactionary culture of
imperiled privilege” that drove the success of “[t]he right-wing cultural agenda of the
Reagan revolution.”373 Berlant’s project was not focused on religion, but her analysis of
right-wing politics is germane. First, she noted that the cultural struggle was deeply
related to the struggle over the material and symbolic conditions of US citizenship. In
particular, the anger of “white and male and heterosexual people of all classes who are
said to sense that they have lost the respect of their culture, and with it the freedom to feel
unmarked. . . . They sense that they now have identities, when it used to be that other
people had them.”374 Second, she noted that there was no public sphere in the
contemporary United States that made ordinary citizens like them part of a common
culture or that the state was accountable to their opinions. Right-wing Christianity was a
response to both problems Berlant named. The movement was denominationally diverse,
politically cohesive, and provided “imperiled citizens” a way to cloak the biases
undergirding their opposition to the material conditions that progressive movements
created.
372 Dochuk, From Bible Belt to Sun Belt, xxii. 373 Lauren Berlant, “Introduction,” The Queen of America Goes to Washington: Essays on Sex and Citizenship (Durham, NC: Duke University, 1997), 6–7. 374 Ibid, 2–3.
170 Falwell’s 1965 sermon “Ministers and Marchers” condemned the very Christian
political activism for which he became famous. Criticizing faith leaders such as Reverend
Martin Luther King, Jr., he admonished Christians that: “Nowhere are we commissioned
to reform the externals. We are not told to wage wars against bootleggers, liquor stores,
gamblers, murderers, prostitutes . . . prejudiced persons or institutions, or any other
existing evil as such. . . . I believe we need to rededicate ourselves to the great task of
turning this world back to God.”375 Not only did Falwell deny the validity of “the
externals,” that is, the physical, psychological, and economic violence that necessitated
civil rights protest, he also argued that the “great task” for the United States was to return
to an idealized past. This social and Christian nostalgia, then, served as a code for a time
in which de facto and de jure discrimination remained intact and unchallenged.
For conservatives such as Anita Bryant, social and Christian nostalgia constituted
a rejection of the notion that American ideals of freedom and equality are endlessly
capacious. Rather, Bryant believed that the expansion of civil rights to gays and lesbians
threatened the very fabric of the family and the nation. She told an interviewer:
If people are discriminated against now under the civil rights law they can take it to court. . . . Homosexuals are not a race. It is not a birthright to be a homosexual. . . . A homosexual is not born, they are made. If [homosexuals] are a legitimate minority group then so are nail-biters, fat people, short people, whatever. The laws of the land have always been to protect the normal, not the abnormal. If you’re going to have a preferential legislative piece for everyone in the whole world, it becomes ridiculous . . . it puts the law of the land on the side of the unrighteous!376
Bryant’s articulation of “injustice fatigue” was echoed a few years later by Jerry Falwell:
375 Quoted in Harding, who states that Falwell had made several sermons unavailable in order to prevent their being used against him. Harding, The Book of Jerry Falwell, 286. 376 Anita Bryant, The Anita Bryant Story: The Survival of Our Nation’s Families and the Threat of Militant Homosexuality (Old Tappan, NJ: Fleming H. Revell Company, 1977), 73.
171 “I’m rather tired about hearing about our rights and privileges as American citizens. The time has come, it now is, when we ought to hear about the duties and responsibilities of citizenship.”377 In a curious contradiction of “traditional values,” Bryant decided that her duty as a Christian mother and homemaker was to combat gay rights after a January 1977 church service. That Sunday, her pastor, who taught that homosexuality violated divine moral law, announced that the Miami City Council was going to vote on an ordinance that would protect homosexuals from employment discrimination. Bryant was inspired by her pastor to join the disparate groups of believers who rallied around a narrative of redemptive heteronormativity that combined Christian belief and political concerns.
The political moment, though, compelled Bryant to distinguish opposition to gay rights from opposition to the recent legislation establishing the civil rights of African
Americans. In her 1977 autobiography, which detailed her infamous battle against
“militant homosexuals,” Bryant reflected the care that conservatives were taking to avoid charges of bigotry: “We were not opposing an individual’s right to be treated with equality and fairness, but we did rise in opposition to the misleading demand of so-called civil rights for homosexuals who are not a legitimate oppressed minority with the same claims and rights as, say, Chicanos or blacks.”378 To that end, Bryant, who had no known interest in racial equality much less black nationalism, clumsily cited Imam Wallace D.
Muhammad, who had been chosen to lead the Nation of Islam after the death of his father
Elijah Muhammad in 1975: “The Black Muslim publication, Muhammad Speaks reported: Homosexuals Demand Special Rights. The Honorable Eman [sic] Wallis [sic]
377 Falwell, Listen, America!, 22. 378 Bryant, The Anita Bryant Story, 34.
172 D. Muhammad, spiritual leader, said, ‘Homosexuals already have the same rights as other
members of society under the law. The trouble with our world is that we have lost contact
with common sense.’” 379 Bryant also used another quote from the article: “They
(homosexuals) have tried to confuse the black community by persuading the black
community that all forms of discrimination are equated with the struggle. The
homosexuals came in on the civil rights movement, attached themselves to it, and tried to
take it over to the point of equating civil rights with homosexual rights. It is a political
weapon that we have to be very careful not to become involved in.”380 In citing black
opposition to gay rights, Bryant demonstrated the binary that erased black LGBT people
and caused conservative black Christians to identify with white evangelicals who had
little to no interest in their opinions just years before.
Carl McIntire, a staunch supporter of Bryant, was among those white conservative
Christians who believed God ordained racial inequality and condemned gays and
lesbians. McIntire denied that opposition to gay rights was a violation of human rights in
a sermon devoted to the subject of homosexuality: “newspaper ads alleged that the homos
were being subject to hate, witch-hunt, Nazi-style attacks. Where has this been heard
before? These are the allegations that have been heaped for years upon those who stood
up against the liberal society, or the leftists and the Communists.”381 Supporters of racial
integration had long been cast as supporters of communism.382 During the civil rights
379 Imam Wallace D. Muhammad was not a black separatist like his father and, facing internal resistance, left the Nation of Islam in 1978. Bryant, The Anita Bryant Story, 34. 380 Dr. Bobby Wright quoted in Bryant, The Anita Bryant Story, 34. 381 Carl McIntire, “Finding a New Name: The Homosexuals,” (1977), http://www.carlmcintire.org/t- sermons-homosexuals.php. 382 Robin D.G. Kelley argues that “anti-Communism was also a veil for racism.” Robin D.G. Kelly, Hammer and Hoe: Alabama Communists during the Great Depression (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina, 1990), 141. Jeff R. Woods also studied the relationship between anti-Communism and
173 movement Reverend Jerry Falwell preached that supporters of racial equality were
controlled by Communists and, therefore, support for racial integration was anti-
American: “The true negro does not want integration. He realizes his potential is far
better among his own race. Who then is propagating this terrible thing? . . . We see the
hand of Moscow in the background.”383 McIntire opposed the 1964 Civil Rights Act in a
passionate letter to President Lyndon B. Johnson that rejected the notion that everyone is
equal in the eyes of God and argued that the civil disobedience of the civil rights
movement was tantamount to apostasy: “It is my firm belief that what this nation needs is
not federal legislation but our people need to be brought face to face with the eternal law
of God as set forth in your mother’s Bible. . . . When men turn away from the Bible and
its teachings, they look to the State and its power.”384 McIntire rebuked President
Johnson and other civil rights supporters for supplanting divine authority with the
authority of the State. To McIntire, “the State and its power” was a false idol that
threatened to supplant his conception of divine order regarding matters of race, as well as
gender and sexuality. Invoking Johnson’s mother, he reminded the president that
scripture provided Christian justifications of racial inequality.
As evidence of shifting conceptions of both Christianity and race, the
segregationist practice of using Christian conviction to justify explicit racial bias had lost its appeal by the 1970s.385 Confidence in the finality of the laws passed during the civil
antiblack racism. Jeff R. Woods, Black Struggle, Red Scare: Segregation and Anti-Communism in the South, 1948-1968 (Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State University Press, 2003). 383 Jerry Falwell, “Segregation or Integration – Which?” Sermon preached at his church in Lynchburg, Virginia, reprinted in Word of Life, October 1958. Quoted in Williams, God’s Own Party, 33, 285 n.1. 384 Johnson was sworn in using his mother’s Bible. “Johnson, Humphrey Sworn into Office.” 385 Perhaps its last legal gasp was the case of Maurice Bessinger, a South Carolina restaurant owner who argued in court that, as a Baptist, the Civil Rights Act violated his religious beliefs, which compelled him not to serve black people in his establishment and to oppose racial integration. The United States Supreme
174 rights movement led to new coalitions that strategically included blacks and other people
of color even though the Religious Right remained overwhelmingly white and dominated
by people who opposed or were otherwise indifferent to the fight to end racial
segregation. As noted by historian Daniel K. Williams, “The end of the civil rights
movement facilitated the formation of a new Christian political coalition, because it
enabled fundamentalists and evangelicals who had disagreed over racial integration to
come together. After the passage of civil rights legislation and the end of nationally
publicized civil rights marches, fundamentalists such as Jerry Falwell accepted the reality
of racial integration and began forging political alliances with mainstream Republicans
who would have been embarrassed by their segregationist rhetoric only a few years
earlier.”386 Falwell assured evangelicals that Christianity made them different from—and
the remedy to—feminists, homosexuals, and others whose social and political aspirations
were believed to jeopardize America’s future.
When people began to question his politicization of religion in the 1980s,
Reverend Falwell explained that he became politically involved in response to the social justice movements of the 1960s and 1970s, stating, “It is not the religious conservatives in this country who have politicized the gospel. [. . .] It is the liberal in the church and in the government, who has turned the basic moral values that were the foundation of this country into political issues.”387 He later admitted that he had in fact been a racist but
Court ruled against Bessinger, 8–0, in 1968. He continued to believe that God gave white people a divine right to enslave black people and to sell racist literature in his restaurant but insisted that he was a proponent of private property and state sovereignty more than racial hatred. Newman v. Piggie Park Enterprises, Inc. 390 U.S. 400 (1968). 386 Williams, God’s Own Party, 6. 387 Jerry Falwell, “The Maligned Moral Majority,” Newsweek (September 21, 1981), 17. Quoted in Williams, God’s Own Party, 175.
175 never understood himself as such until God used black Christians (one a pastor in the
Dominican Republic and the other a man named Lewis, who shined Falwell’s shoes) to
“get [Falwell] to understand and acknowledge my own racial sinfulness” in the 1960s.388
In 1981, he apologized for his attacks on Martin Luther King, Jr. before a mostly black
gathering of two hundred ministers on the South Side of Chicago: “Dr. King was a true
saint. . . . I confess, I was wrong.”389 Falwell emphasized that it was God, not the
movement for black civil rights, that changed his heart. Further, Falwell used the black
civil rights struggle as a model of effective organizing: “It’s amazing what we’ve learned
from feminists and the other side. Civil Rights people had the kind of backbone to stand
up for their freedom, and Christians better have that kind of backbone too.”390 Despite
claiming that civil rights activists were the “other side,” by the end of the 1980s he was
claiming minoritarian status for conservative Christians: “We are the last minority. . . .
You can no longer attack a man’s color, but right today you can refer to fundamentalists
as Bible-bangers.”391 He denied the importance and impact of progressive political
organizing by and for black people by attributing to divine intervention the shifts required
of him and other Christians who had supported racial segregation. Falwell, and the larger
Religious Right movement, recuperated their opposition to black civil rights by claiming
it as evidence of God intervening in their lives. For Falwell, conservative Christianity
represented the country’s founding values. Falwell’s strategic erasure of the history of
388 Jerry Falwell. Jerry Falwell: An Autobiography (Lynchburg, VA: Liberty House Publishers, 1997), 316–321. 389 James S. Tinney, “The Moral Majority Operating Under the Hood of the Religious Right,” Dollars and Sense, June/July 1981, 68-73. 390 Falwell quoted in Susan H. Harding; Harding, The Book of Jerry Falwell, 9. 391 Walt Harrington, “What Hath Falwell Wrought? Fundamentalism's Superstar Has Won Power and Respect for His Religion. In the Process, He Is Risking Fundamentalism's Soul,” Washington Post Magazine, July 24, 1988.
176 race and gender violence and discrimination was recast as patriotic faith in a romantic
narrative of religion and the Founding Fathers.
Conservative black Christians strategically positioned themselves within a transhistorical narrative of biblical principle that erased the history of white supremacist
Christianity. By adopting a romantic narrative of shared Christian identity, they claimed, in solidarity with white evangelicals, that scripture prohibited same-sex behavior—even though the same Bible contained several justifications for slavery and other forms of racial subjugation. Black conservative Christians such as Reverend Robert Harris gained unprecedented purchase on the language citizenship and rights by ignoring the ways his faith tradition had once been used to justify slavery. In the wake of the civil rights movement, Harris was among black Americans who ran for office in unprecedented numbers and won campaigns that would have been unthinkable even ten years before. In
October of 1979, two years after Bryant became a national figure, Reverend Troy Perry traveled by train from Oakland, California, to Washington, DC, for the first March on
Washington for Gay and Lesbian Rights. Harris, a black Pentecostal minister in the
Church of God in Christ who had been elected to the State House of Representatives in
1977, made a startling display of resistance to comparisons of the struggles for black and gay civil rights.
Reverend Perry and seventy-five other gays and lesbians boarded “the Gay
Freedom Train” in San Francisco, California, in route to Washington, DC, for the
October 14 March on Washington for Gay and Lesbian Rights. As the head of the
Universal Fellowship of Metropolitan Community Churches, Perry had officially endorsed the March and assured the waiting crowd that a new era of liberation was at
177 hand.392 Perry prophesied that gays and lesbians living in the 1970s—unlike those of the
1940s—would not be compelled to seek refuge in metropolitan “gay ghettos” such as Los
Angeles, San Francisco, and New York.393 The dominant, metronormative narrative of gay liberation was that gay men in major cities enjoyed more sexual freedom.394 In previous generations, gay men in urban areas such as New York had lived “straight” lives that veiled the desire enacted in clandestine sexual encounters often fraught with fear of entrapment. Others created communities by “observing the era’s norms of discretion
[even as they] immersed themselves in a gay world.”395 At each train stop on the way to
National March for Gay and Lesbian Rights, Perry preached that even small-town
America would have to recognize the equality of gay and lesbian citizens.396
In one small town, however, Utah State Representative Reverend Robert L. Harris proclaimed an altogether different message: “Homosexuals, you are devils. You are not welcome here.”397 On October 11, 1979, Harris laid across the train tracks in Ogden,
392 Prominent Jewish lesbian activist Robin Tyler also addressed those who gathered to greet the crowd. Tyler is perhaps best known for her role in calling for the National March, as well as being the first openly lesbian comedian and the first to appear on national television in a Phyllis Diller special. “Robin Tyler Calls for March on D.C.,” The Advocate (June 18, 2005), http://www.advocate.com/news/2005/06/18/robin-tyler-calls-march-dc-16298. Dudley Clendinen and Adam Nagourney, Out for Good: The Struggle to Build a Gay Rights Movement in America (New York: Touchstone, 1999). 393 See George Chauncey, Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture and the Making of the Gay Male World, 1890–1940 (New York: Basic Books, 1994). 394 “Metronormativity” is Judith Halberstam’s term for the tendency to posit major cities as “gay promise lands” free from the dangers and indignities attributed to rural life. The term connects notions of social and political freedom to life in metropolitan areas in narratives of gay liberation. Halberstam, In a Queer Time and Place, 36. For a history of gay men at the beginning of the twentieth century, see: Chauncey, Gay New York. 395 John D’Emilio, Lost Prophet: The Life and Times of Bayard Rustin (New York: Free Press, 2003), 196. 396 John Howard, Men Like That: A Southern Queer History (Chicago: University of Chicago, 2001); Halberstam, In a Queer Time and Space; Scott Herring, Another Country: Queer Anti-Urbanism (New York: New York University, 2010); Bud W. Jerke, “Queer Ruralism,” Harvard Journal of Law and Gender 34 (2011), 260–312. 397 This is from an “audio scrapbook” of the 1979 journey of the Gay Freedom Train and National March, which is available online: http://www.lib.berkeley.edu/MRC/pacificalgbt/pacificalgbt2.html#1970s. The
178 Utah, to block the Gay Freedom Train’s passage. At the time Harris was an Ogden
mayoral candidate and minister within the Church of God in Christ (COGIC)—the
socially conservative and predominantly African American Pentecostal denomination.
Harris had made history just two years before as noted in a new publication from Howard
University, Spirit: A Journal of Issues Incident to Black Pentecostalism: “the first Black
in the history of the Utah legislature is Robert L. Harris, a Church of God in Christ
pastor, who stunned observers by beating a white Mormon opponent.”398 Harris’s
surprise victory in the 1976 election convinced him that he had been favored by God to
influence American politics. For Harris, this political milestone was evidence that God
was at work in the earth, creating unprecedented opportunities for Christians. Therefore,
Harris’s train-track prostration was a gesture that modeled submission to what he
understood to be a biblical mandate to condemn homosexuality and signaled his
identification with the antigay conservatism of the New Christian Right. Yelling that
homosexuality was the “worst sin in the bible,” Harris positioned himself as having both
biblical knowledge and spiritual authority, but his certitude faltered in the face of Perry’s
challenge to name, in “scripture and verse,” any scriptural justification for Harris’s
claim.399 Instead, Harris admonished Perry, saying “You need to read the bible!” to
which Perry replied, “Yeah, I have read the bible. I’ve read Romans 1:26–28, I
Corinthians 6:9, I Timothy 1:9-10.”
Perry not only demonstrated superior knowledge of the verses used to condemn
fifty-nine-minute digital file includes the argument between Perry and Harris. The encounter is also referenced in Perry, Call Me Troy. 398 James Tinney, “Notes on Black Religion,” in Spirit: A Journal of Issues Incident to Black Pentecostalism (August 1977), 61. 399 http://www.lib.berkeley.edu/MRC/pacificalgbt/pacificalgbt2.html#1970s.
179 homosexuality, he showed that the Bible was used by working-class evangelicals to demonstrate what might be called “godly erudition.” Protestants’ ability to read and interpret scripture for themselves, whether or not they have been educated at a university or seminary, renders every believer equipped to call out wrongs and to be recognized as a witness for God. Further, as defined by Jerry Falwell and the Religious Right movement, denouncing progressive social movements was a kind of faith-based activism that every
Christian could do.400 In Harris’s view, professing Christian identity was a way to make himself legible. Harris, therefore, attempted to demonstrate more knowledge of the Bible than Perry because he believed such knowledge was evidence of moral superiority. Also, because evangelicals considered the Bible to be God’s message to humankind, its authority superseded every other source of knowledge. Perry refuted Harris’s attempt to use the Old Testament Sodom and Gomorrah narrative as a trump card: “They were destroyed because God couldn’t find ten righteous people in it. Period! That’s what the scriptures say. Nothing to do with homosexuality!” to which an incredulous Harris stammered:
It’s the worst sin in the bible! I love you devils but I’m gonna tell you the truth, see? (Harris’ voice gradually softens from shouting to a more moderate tone.) God is not pleased with you, see? And you know most people don’t have enough guts, most preachers don’t have enough guts! I surely admire ol’ Anita Bryant. Most people don’t have enough guts—oh, I really admire her—most people don’t have enough guts to tell you crooks the truth, see? But this is the only religious state that’s headed by [religious] officials in the country and we definitely don’t appreciate you coming here.
Here Perry’s superior knowledge of the biblical text caused Harris to attempt to reassert moral superiority. Harris used the term “devils” here to say that gays and lesbians were
400 Falwell, Listen, America!
180 sinners and, therefore, claimed to be motivated by love to tell the truth of God’s
displeasure with homosexuality. Harris then made two important attempts to shore up his
moral standing. First, he invoked Anita Bryant and thus positioned himself in agreement
with her campaign to reverse gay rights in Miami Dade County and across the country
through Save Our Children. Second, Harris asserted the likeness of Pentecostalism and
Mormonism to show that Christian belief constituted a new and unifying identity. Perry
used Christianity to assert a moral and a political self rightfully demanding all rights of
citizenship. Harris used Christianity to assert a moral and political self wholly invested in
protecting the citizenry from gay rights claims. Harris resisted conceiving his own black
identity with Perry’s reference to black oppression and homophobia. Perry rejected
Harris’ claim that homosexuality was a sin. Together, they illustrated the complex and
often contradictory ways Christians attempt to link private faith and American civil
religion.401
People of color such as Harris typically identified with the Right on sexual and
gender issues but did not share the same nostalgia for America’s past. Such strategic
identification illustrates that the public performance of Christian belief was its own brand
of civic engagement. Political scientist Fredrick Harris argued that black Christians
engaged in an “oppositional civic culture,” in that they used their faith “to practice
organizing and civic skills and to develop positive orientations to the civic order,” and to
develop “material resources and oppositional dispositions to challenge their marginality
through modes of action and thought that call for inclusion in the political system instead
401 This content and the earlier quotes are from: http://www.lib.berkeley.edu/MRC/pacificalgbt/pacificalgbt2.html#1970s.
181 of exclusion from the polity.”402 African American Christians who supported civil rights believed that God had intervened in their lives. For them, it was ultimately God’s power at work in people such as Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. that brought about the end of legal segregation and opened the way to new economic opportunities and legal protections. At the same time, a number of black Christians opposed the civil rights movement. King specifically criticized black ministers who refused to join the civil rights movement because they believed it was wrong for them to “get mixed up in such earthy, temporal matters as social and economic improvement.”403 Whether active in or apathetic to the civil rights movement, therefore, black Christians ultimately recuperated political change as evidence of God’s transformative power. Either way, that recuperation resulted in a triumphant narrative of God’s omniscience, omnipotence, and active presence in human affairs. The next section will demonstrate that narrative’s appeal to people of color who also perceived that America was experiencing a moral decline that only a return to God could fix.
Washington for Jesus
Because we have turned from God, God’s chastisement is upon us. We now enter a time of maximum peril. Both economic and military debacle confront us. . . . We, as members of the Body of Christ, assemble in this nation’s capital heeding the words of Holy Scripture which state:
“If my people, which are called by my name, shall humble themselves, and pray, and seek my face, and turn from their wicked ways; then will I hear from heaven, and will forgive their sin, and will heal their land.” (II Chronicles 7:14)404
402 Harris, Something Within, 40. 403 King quoted in Harris, Something Within, 42–43. 404 Excerpt from the Washington for Jesus position paper. “A Christian Declaration,” Herald Times, April 24, 1980; 1 Chron. 7:14 KJV.
182
After his encounter with Reverend Harris, Troy Perry addressed the thousands of lesbians and gays at the first March on Washington for Gay and Lesbian Rights in Washington,
DC. His ministry, and the growth of LGBT faith groups, was a direct challenge to the notion that gays and lesbians were not included in the body of Christ. One month later,
Pastor John Gimenez, a conservative Pentecostal from Spanish Harlem and the son of
Puerto Rican immigrants, received a vision from the Lord to bring conservative
Christians together to repent for the country’s moral decline and to pray for God to heal
America of its sins, which he believed included the gay rights movement.
Pastor John Gimenez said that the Lord gave him the vision for Washington for
Jesus in 1979 while he was preaching in Oakland, California. His relationship with Christ had been defined by dramatic transformations. Gimenez was delivered from heroin addiction in 1963 while living at a rehabilitation camp led by pastors of Damascus
Christian Church in the Bronx. Two years later, he met Anne, a fiery evangelist from
Corpus Christi who became his wife. At the time he was on tour with The Addicts, a multiracial evangelical performance group consisting of Christians who had been addicted to heroin. The Addicts’ 1966 album, The Addicts Sing, was a dramatization of addiction and the singers’ deliverance by the power of Jesus Christ. The back cover explained their objective: “We are doing this drama for two reasons[:] First we are trying to awaken America to this problem and to warn young people of the depravity and death in drug addiction. And second, to correct the false thesis of the medical and other professions that there is no hope of cure for the drug addict. We have not only found the
183 cure, but we have been completely transformed by the power of God. And we want
everybody to know about it.”405 This excerpt from the album cover exemplifies the way
conservative evangelicals of color envisioned faith in Jesus Christ as the answer to the
problem of drugs and addiction. As people with the “answer” to such social problems,
evangelical Christians such as Gimenez believed they had a responsibility to impact
America by testifying of the difference Christ had made in their lives.406
In 1965, Gimenez met Reverend Marion “Pat” Robertson, the founder of the
Christian Broadcast Network (CBN) and the future CBN University, and the two developed a close friendship. In 1979, Gimenez told Robertson that he had received a vision from the Lord while preaching in Oakland, California, that included people from around the world and a man “speaking the word of God” to the United States. Gimenez believed the Lord led him to bring a hundred thousand Christians to Washington to pray for the country. Robertson later recalled that conversation, “Brother . . . I want to call
Americans, Christians, to Washington and claim Washington for Jesus.”407 Robertson
encouraged him to envision one million people praying for God’s forgiveness for the
nation’s perceived moral decline. Robertson co-chaired the Washington for Jesus steering committee with Reverend Bill Bright, founder of Intervarsity Christian Fellowship and organizer of Explo ’72, and helped to fund the event from the $50 million in yearly
405 The Addicts members were: John Gimenez, Gilbert Mesa, Jerry Rutkin, James Dunleavy, Rudy Rosado, Louie Colon, George Mathews, Frank Rodriquez, and Cecil White. The Addicts Sing appears to have been their only release. “And God Gave Me A Fix: From Junk To Jesus” by John Cook (also known as Sonny Austin) was a similarly themed album narrating the spiritual journey of a former addict. 406 John and Anne founded the Rock Church in 1968, a thriving, multiracial megachurch that continues to combine faith, racial diversity, and patriotism in Virginia Beach, Virginia. John Gimenez passed away in 2008. 407 Stephen G. Vegh, “Rock Church Leader Praised for Local, National Impact,” The Virginian Pilot, February 20, 2008. http://hamptonroads.com/2008/02/mourners-gather-funeral-rock-church-bishop-john- gimenez.
184 donations to his Christian television ministry. WFJ opened 380 offices across the country
and spent approximately a million dollars after over a year and half of planning and
organizing.408 When reporters questioned the way the event seemed to mix politics and
religion, Robertson replied, “We are coming to repent of our corporate sins . . . then to
ask our fellow citizens to repent” and then to ask God for “a healing” of the nation.409
Gimenez spent months telling reporters that believers were coming to pray for the nation,
not to pursue a political agenda. The WFJ Steering Committee seemed to contradict
Gimenez’s protests when they released a “Declaration” of their intention to “return to the
dream of our Founding Fathers.”410
The rally’s steering committee disseminated “A Christian Declaration” in the
months leading up to the event. The document asserted that, although God had indeed
blessed America since its founding, the nation was now being chastised for a host of
sexual and political sins that included divorce, governmental irresponsibility, and
homosexuality. The Washington for Jesus team analogized their response to the moral
crisis of the current moment to President Abraham Lincoln’s proclamation of April 30,
1863, as a “day of national humiliation, fasting and prayer:” “We have been the recipients
of the choicest bounties of heaven; we have grown in numbers, wealth, and power as no
other nation has ever grown. But we have forgotten God. We have forgotten the gracious
408 “Religious Rally on Mall in the Capital Draws Support and Criticism,” New York Times (1923-Current file), April 27, 1980. http://proxygw.wrlc.org/login?url=https://search-proquest- com.proxygw.wrlc.org/docview/121231905?accountid=11243 (accessed April 8, 2018). 409 Hyer, “Support for Christian Rally.” 410 Reverend Billy Graham, who had emceed Explo ’72, the Christian youth revival discussed in chapter 1, also believed the nation was in a moral crisis but declined the invitation to participate in Washington for Jesus because of concerns about linking the gospel message with politics. “A Christian Declaration” was published in Flame, the newsletter of Reverend Pat Robertson’s 700 Club; Dochuk, From Bible Belt to Sun Belt; Turner, Bill Bright and Campus Crusade for Christ; Williams, God’s Own Party.
185 hand which preserved us in peace and multiplied, enriched, and strengthened us.”411
Citing President Lincoln’s words, which were written during the Civil War, they created
a transhistorical narrative of political redemption in which people of faith were, once
again, called to action: Christians needed to repent for having stood idly by as the United
States fell into moral decay and reclaim Washington for Jesus Christ.
Gimenez’s vision was manifested April 28–29, 1980. The nation’s capital was
dark and wet with rain on the morning of April 29, 1980, when hundreds of thousands of
evangelical Christians began to gather on the National Mall to repent and pray. The two-
day rally boasted leading white conservative evangelicals: Pat Robertson, Bill Bright, and
James Robison, as well as prominent evangelicals of color: Bishop Edward Vincent
(E.V.) Hill, John Gimenez, Bishop J.O. Patterson, and Nicky Cruz. Like Explo ’72, the
conservative evangelical youth rally discussed in chapter 1, Washington for Jesus was a
multiracial, national conservative evangelical rally. It differed from Explo ’72 in that it
did not hold special workshops on race and ethnicity. Instead, Latino and black speakers
and participants shared their faith in Jesus Christ through word and song, their presence
communicating that, regardless of race or denomination, conservative Christians were
“one people” in God. Gimenez believed that his journey from drug addiction in Spanish
Harlem to leadership of a spiritual battle to change the national religious and political
landscape was a testament to the inconsequence of race for those who loved God.
The Washington for Jesus speakers explicitly claimed that God required them to
change American politics. More directly, Christians were called to use their relationship
411 Lincoln quoted in ,“A Christian Declaration,” published in the April 24, 1980 issue of the Herald Times in Gaylord Michigan. “A Christian Declaration.”
186 with God to restore America to its founding ideals. In lofty, historically tone-deaf language, evangelicals across race and class spoke as if Christians throughout the history of the United States had constituted a morally and politically coherent community. Dr.
Bill Bright said that, except for the day the country was founded, the Washington for
Jesus Rally of 1980 was the most important event in the history of the United States. “We came to say, ‘America, we want to come back to the founding of our nation, we want to come back to the historic roots, we want to come back to the bible and back to God. And if we don’t turn [back to God] we face crisis and chaos.”412 Pat Robertson further enmeshed private faith and civil religion: “As far as I can see there are people
. . . thousands of people have come because you love Jesus, and you love this land, and you know the time has come to pray and to seek God for a great move of his Spirit in
America! But this land has gone far from the purposes for which it was planted. And God loves this nation enough that He has called you and me to come, at our own expense, humbly, prayerfully, to cry out to Him and to call on our fellow citizens across America to repent that God might bless this land.”413
By “trusting God” that Christian segregationists were no longer racist and privileging Christian identity over race, conservative African Americans and Latinos essentially ignored the echoes of white supremacist Christianity at Washington for Jesus.
For example, the keynote speaker at Washington for Jesus was Adrien Rogers, president of the Southern Baptists Association. Southern Baptists formed a separate organization in
1848 over the issue of slavery. Reverend Perry used their history to demonstrate that
412 “A 700 Club Special!” 413 Ibid.
187 biblical interpretations were once used to oppress black people and to call attention to
interpretative changes regarding race over time. Perry noted that Southern Baptists were
“slave-owning Baptists [who] quoted the apostle Paul as their authority for the ‘God-
given right’ to own people as slaves. In this day and age nobody in her or his right mind
would say such a thing. But Paul not only said it, he wrote it in the Bible.”414
Over thirty thousand people had attended a prayer vigil at RFK Stadium the night before the thirteen-hour Washington for Jesus rally. The speakers at the vigil included
Nicky Cruz, a Latino evangelist and former gang member, who testified that he had accepted Jesus Christ as his personal savior after Reverend David Wilkerson had witnessed to him about Jesus’s love and power to heal all the pain in his life. Cruz’s conversion to Christianity was celebrated in the evangelical classic The Cross and the
Switchblade by Reverend Wilkerson.415 Black conservative Republican Reverend
Edward Vincent (E.V.) Hill gave the rally’s opening prayer, and in the event’s lore, grey
clouds parted, and the sun emerged as his prayer closed. Bishop J.O. Patterson, presiding prelate of the predominantly black Pentecostal denomination Church of God in Christ
(COGIC), also spoke from the main stage. Patterson admonished the crowd that, “Our trouble began when we turned our backs on God and his word,” and the result was seen in the rates of crime, the legalization of abortion and growing public acceptance of
“shacking” or nonmarital heterosexual sex.
Gimenez’s message was consistent with his vision of Christian unity. Citing II
414 Perry and Swicegood, Don’t Be Afraid Anymore,” 41. 415 Cruz’s story was depicted in 1970 in the eponymous film based on Wilkinson’s book. Cruz also wrote his autobiography Run Baby Run in 1968, the eponymous film version of the autobiography was released in 1998.
188 Chronicles 7:14, John Gimenez explained why evangelicals had travelled from across the
country in response to his vision: “We are here because we need healing!”416 Gimenez
challenged evangelicals who were reluctant to organize across denomination, doctrine, or
race to repent from their unbiblical reluctance. Jesus had not called for unity among
Baptists or Catholics or Lutherans, “It’s not in the book [Bible]!” Instead, Jesus prayed
“that they may be one.” The crowd roared their witness as Gimenez exhorted, “He was
talking about the Baptists and about the Lutherans and about the Catholics and about the
white and about the black and about the ‘whosoever—anybody who calls upon the name
of Jesus, that’s who He was talking about!”417 Here Gimenez referenced two scriptures.
First, Jesus prayed in the 17th chapter of the book of John that those who believe in him
as the son of God would be united.418 Second, Gimenez referenced John 3:16, the
scripture that Martin Luther is said to have called the gospel in miniature: “For God so
loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son that whosoever believeth in Him
should not perish but have everlasting life.”419 To Gimenez and most people on the Mall
that day, “whosoever” signified the equality of all who believed in Jesus, regardless of
denominational affiliation. However, the position paper for Washington for Jesus
indicated that homosexuals were not included: “We call upon this nation to return to the
dream of our Founding Fathers . . . to repent of conduct contrary to the purposes for
which it was founded and the clear commandment of the Word of God. . . . There is
416 “A 700 Club Special!” 417 Ibid. 418 The first scripture Gimenez references is John 17: 20-21. 419 The “whosoever” in this scripture is central to Reverend Richard Cizik’s efforts to conceive a “new evangelicalism.’ Cizik was fired by the National Association of Evangelicals after he expressed support for civil unions and said that he had voted for Barack Obama; Richard Cizik, “My Journey toward A New Evangelicalism,” in A New Evangelical Manifesto: A Kingdom Vision for the Common Good, ed. David P. Gushee (St. Louis, Missouri: Chalice Press), 29.
189 adultery, rape, fornication, homosexuality and filthiness of mind throughout the land.”420
Even though conservative evangelicals dominated American religious discourse,
gay and lesbian Christians and their allies refused to be erased. Within and beyond
affirming faith-communities, progressive people of faith protested conservatives’
homophobia and attempted to use their own Christian Identity to counter it. Reverend
Troy Perry and the wider LGBT Christian movement believed that “whosoever” did [or
should] include gays and lesbians.421 LGBT Christians also believed that they could
bridge the gap between themselves and their antigay siblings in Christ by appealing to
their shared faith in Jesus Christ. Pastor Larry Uhrig and thirteen other members of
MCC-DC, the Washington, DC, congregation of Perry’s Metropolitan Community
Churches, showed up with other believers at Washington for Jesus. They carried signs that read “I’m a Lesbian and Jesus is My Lord,” and the title of Perry’s first book, “The
Lord is My Shepherd and He Knows I’m Gay.”422 Even though conservative Christians
called them hell-bound homosexuals and shouted, “I curse you in the name of Jesus,”
Pastor Uhrig said they were also part of the body of Christ who marched “not [as] a
counter-demonstration, but a way of saying we too are Christians.”423
Progressive people of faith also took issue with the idea that Washington should
be claimed for one religion. A group of Christian, Jewish, and secular leaders formed an
ad hoc coalition called April Alliance. “We challenge those Christians who have come to
Washington this week to Christianize government,” said Rabbi Richard Sternberger,
420 “A Christian Declaration.” 421 Troy Perry quoted in Gallagher, “Is God Gay?” 43. Also see Perry and Swicegood, Don’t Be Afraid Anymore. 422 Dordon Duggins, “Washington for Jesus Draws 2000,000 Christians,” Gay Community News (Boston) 7, no. 41, (May 10, 1980), 1. 423 Duggins, “Washington for Jesus Draws 2000,000 Christians.”
190 director of the Mid-Atlantic Council, Union of American Hebrew Congregations.424
Reverend James Tinney rejected “the idea that Washington should be for Jesus or
Muhammad or Buddha or any other religious figure. It should be for all the people of
every faith and no faith.”425 Reverend David Eaton, senior minister at All Souls Unitarian
Church in Washington, DC, questioned the motives of WFJ leaders, stating, “Personally,
I find the March borders upon manipulation. Many of the organizers have political track
records that are not only conservative but almost reactionary. Some of these persons have
hoarded millions and millions of dollars and seek to completely ignore the social gospel.
They seem to have no understanding of what it means to help the poor in this country.”426
Although not an evangelical Christian, Eaton here pointed to the difference between the simple gospel and the social gospel. In particular, he suggested that the millions of dollars mega-churches, televangelists, and parachurch organizations raked in should ameliorate the lived conditions of the economically disadvantaged.
Adam DeBaugh, director of the Washington office of MCC, accused the Right of using “Christianity as a facade for a political organization. [He argued that all of] their policies are blatantly sexist and racist.” Still, the rhetoric of groups such as the April
Alliance lacked the fire and conviction of conservatives and denunciations of the
“politicality” of the Religious Right did little to motivate likeminded liberals to counter-
protest at the nation’s capital.427 MCC-DC cancelled an interreligious news conference
424 Betty Anne Williams, “April Alliance Condemns Christian Rally,” The Associated Press, April 29, 1980, accessed Wednesday, March 9, 2011. 425 Ibid. 426 Ibid. 427 According to PikiIsh-Shalom, “politicality—informed by Antonio Gramsci’s theory of hegemony—is the socio-political action” that seeks to prevail in conflict over the allocation of material and cultural resources. “The War that Was or Was Not: The Second Lebanon War and the Logic of Politicality,” paper
191 that had been planned by the April Alliance to coincide with the Washington for Jesus
event “because of the insistence of ‘Washington for Jesus’ organizers [. . .] that the event
is not a political one.”428 Pastor Gimenez promised, “We’re not coming to denounce
anyone. We’re coming to pray.”429 Adam DeBaugh, evidencing his own evangelical beliefs, admitted that he agreed with the goal of “bringing the nation back to God” and believed “if we encounter [rally participants] as people of faith, we will have dialogue.”430 Perhaps DeBaugh’s statement was a strategy to call attention to MCC as
sharing some of the Right’s Christian beliefs, but it also is evidence of a remarkable naiveté. DeBaugh presumed that Christians invested in the demonization of homosexuality would perceive gay evangelicals as fundamentally like-minded.
Gay and lesbian Christians continued to draw on their faith to counter Christian bigotry, but the opposition was relentless. Denominations such as the Church of God, the predominantly white Pentecostal denomination from which Reverend Troy Perry was excommunicated, formally established the parameters of “legitimate” sexuality and
Christianity.431 In 1980, Evangel, the official publication of the Church of God, published
a “Resolution on Homosexuality” that resolved that homosexuality “is deviant and sinful,
but that God wills through Christ to heal and restore any homosexual who comes to Him
with a penitent heart . . . the Church of God should show compassion without giving
endorsement, just as Jesus extended compassion to the woman taken in adultery, and that
presented at the annual meeting of the ISA’s 50th annual convention, Exploring the Past, Anticipating the Future, New York Marriot Marquis, New York, February 15, 2009. 428 Walter, “Reactions to Christian Rally Vary,” 6; Williams, “April Alliance Condemns Christian Rally.” 429 Ibid. 430 Ibid. 431 James Tinney’s denomination was the Church of God in Christ, a predominantly black Pentecostal denomination.
192 we are obligated, scripturally, to love the sinner and to restore him regardless of the
nature of his sin.”432 Hughes defined homosexuality as perversion and denoted contrition
and penitence the conditions upon which “compassion” would be shown LGBT people.
The resolution’s emphasis on compassion reflected the “love the sinner, hate the sin”
rhetoric. Such rhetoric attempted to soften the demonization of gays and lesbians, as in
the May 1980 issue of Message of the Open Bible: “Anita Bryant provokes a legitimate fear. Her argument is that homosexuals cannot procreate, therefore they will seek converts from among our young people.”433 Reverend Robert G. Grant in Pasadena,
California, sent a letter to followers asking for “emergency funding” for his ministry,
Christian Cause. Grant warned, “Do not put this letter aside without looking at your child
or grandchild and thinking what will happen to them if militant homosexuals [. . .] get
their way.”434 Whether compassionate or not, however, such language ultimately asserted
the irreconcilability of Christianity and homosexuality.
Despite claims of irreconcilability, conservative Christians were also gay. Robert
Bauman, was a member of the US House of Representatives representing Maryland’s 1st
congressional district when he was caught soliciting young men for sex in gay bars in DC
on October 3, 1980. A rising star of the Religious Right, Bauman had received high
432 Ray H. Hughes, “Resolution on Homosexuality,” Church of God Evangel (June 23, 1980), 2, 26. James S. Tinney Papers. Manuscript Division, Moorland-Spingarn Research Center, Howard University, Box 23, Folder: Pentecostal Arts on Homosex. 433 This periodical was the “official organ of the Open Bible Standard Churches.” Message of the Open Bible, May 1980: 63, no. 5. James S. Tinney Papers. Manuscript Division, Moorland-Spingarn Research Center, Howard University, Box 23, Folder: Pentecostal Arts on Homosex. 434 Reverend Robert G. Grant, “This Letter Will Make You Angry!” This Christian Voice fundraising letter included a survey that asked “do you approve of practicing homosexuals teaching your children? Do you favor banning all prayer in schools? Do you approve of your child being bused daily 20 to 30 miles to a school away from home? Do you approve of the action of the IRS to withdraw tax exempt status from Christian schools!” Cited in the Winter 1980 issue of Evangelicals Concerned.
193 ratings for his Congressional voting record from Jerry Falwell’s Moral Majority. He was
also a founder of Young Americans for Freedom and American Conservative Union in
the early 1960s. He was vice-chair of MD delegation to the RNC that year and a staunch
supporter of Reagan the year the scandal broke. On October 8, Bauman held an emotional
press conference acknowledging that he has suffered from “homosexual tendencies” and
alcoholism. Three years later, he identified as gay and explained that his alcoholism was
the result of efforts to deny his sexuality. He had been married with four kids at the time
and his wife, Carol, asked the Catholic Church to annul their marriage in 1982. Bauman
had voted for the “Family Protection Act,” which sought to prohibit federal funds for any
institution that “presents male or female homosexuality as an acceptable alternative
lifestyle,” to protect antigay employers from prosecution and prevent the federal
government from “seeking to enforce nondiscrimination with respect to homosexuals.”435
He rejected the notion that he was a “political hyporcrite,” even though the “second version [of the Family Protection Act] denied legal services to otherwise qualified gays simply because they were gay, and I was definitely wrong to have voted for it. I never really focused on the gay aspect of the Family Protection Act, and I can’t honestly say I would not have co-sponsored it if I had.” Bauman later wrote about how his faith had changed once he came to terms with his sexuality: “I converted to Catholicism when I was 13. My understanding was that to be a homosexual was a sin, and that was one of the reasons I didn’t want to accept it. I eventually learned that the Church position is that homosexuality is a human condition. Acting upon it is a sin. I still consider myself a
Catholic. I refuse to believe that the Lord created people with an inherent condition that
435 H.R. 7445 – 96th Congress, (1979-1980).
194 denies them the right to love other human beings. The God of my understanding is a
more forgiving God.”436 Personal acceptance of his sexuality shifted his conception of
God’s love for him and other homosexuals, but Bauman’s core identity remained deeply
rooted in the conservative Christian movement built on a utopian vision of an America in
which patriarchy and the nuclear family constituted the foundation of a Christian society.
Bauman’s 1980 scandal did not deter the Religious Right. Rather, he exemplified
the cultural and political contingencies of Christian Identity. Assertions of Christian
identity always reference the intersection of faith, politics, and sexuality but conservative
evangelical Christianity’s appeal is the simultaneity of its claims of moral certainty and
endlessly adaptable personal expression. Published in the same year, Reverend Jerry
Falwell’s Listen America has become a classic example of how the politics of patriarchy,
heterosexism, and thinly veiled white supremacy formed a color-blind conservative
Christianity that appealed to people of all races—including many Christians of color who
distrusted him on race but agreed with his position on social issues such as gay rights,
abortion, and feminism. Falwell did not participate in Washington for Jesus in 1980, but
the book cemented his leadership in the Religious Right. It began as the ruminations of a
concerned father as he and his thirteen-year-old son flew back from a preaching
engagement in Tulsa, Oklahoma. As Falwell reflected on “the moral decay in America
that is destroying our freedoms,” he began to fear that his son would not enjoy the same
privileges of citizenship he had known. Falwell delineated the dangers he believed
feminism, homosexuality, minority rights, and abortion posed to American freedom and
436 A New Day: A Christian Voice from the UFMCC on the Hill, Vol. IV, No. 7, October/November 1980; Robert E. Bauman, “A Former Congressman, Once a Staunch Foe of Gay Rights, Confronts His Own Homosexuality,” People 20, no. 12 (September 19, 1983).
195 morality. His job, he said, was to call America back to her roots—for the sake of his
children and America’s children. His concern was as much an attempt to dominate social
norms as to express Christian faith. In that way he “tapped and translated into
conservative worldviews” the very yearning for belonging and safety that every
progressive social movement at the end of the twentieth century sought to achieve.437
Conclusion
Although the members of the Religious Right remained overwhelmingly white, the conservative sexuality and gender roles championed by the Religious Right resonated with conservative evangelical African Americans and Latinos who were troubled by sexual liberation, women’s liberation, and gay rights. They joined white conservative
Christians, including those such as Falwell and Rogers who had strong ties to Christian segregation. By contrast, Gimenez remained sensitive to the need for racial unity in
America, even as he continued to preach against homosexuality. Gimenez later shared:
“When we first started [Rock Church], I prayed and said, ‘Lord give us a church that looks like heaven, so when we get there we won’t feel out of place’ so we have just about every culture.”438 His vision of a racially diverse afterlife informed his political vision, in
that he believed being in true relationship with God, being a member of the body of
Christ, would nullify racism and overcome racial division.
Post-civil rights faith-based activism revealed the instability of Christian identity
437 Berlant, The Queen of America, 13. 438 Steven G. Vegh, “Bishop John Gimenez, Co-founder of Rock Church, Dies,” Virginian-Pilot, February 14, 2008. https://pilotonline.com/news/article_5e7ecfc8-9fdb-52f1-9d09-7f759bdf2f62.html (accessed online June 16, 2018).
196 and that “the body of Christ” was a trope of spiritual uniformity that belied important
differences in the social meaning of the faith to conservative Christians of different races.
Conservative white evangelicals, in particular, shifted the identitarian discourse of late
twentieth-century social movements by centering their faith, and thereby avoided having
to name the social and economic anxiety they felt as a result of shifting race, gender, and
sexual norms. Some studies found that just over ten percent of whites supported the
Religious Right, but the election of Ronald Reagan and the era of right-wing political
conservatism indicated that far more Americans, including people of color, supported
aspects of the Right’s social and political agenda.439 If one’s way of life was built on the subjugation of others, on marking racial or sexual others as immoral or undeserving of human dignity, then preservation of that way of life became “sanctified,” made legitimate
by faith and valorized by virtue of its necessity. Christians whose religious conviction
justified bigotry thereby rejected critique.
Although central to political activism at the end of the twentieth century,
Christianity has largely escaped critiques such as those directed toward other identities,
particularly, race, gender, and sexuality. “Identity politics” most often refers to political
activity and theorizing based on the shared experiences of members of certain social
groups. Most critiques of identity politics have focused on the violence of categories of identity that race, gender, and queer minorities’ center in their efforts to achieve political equality. For example, The Feminine Mystique and “The Combahee River Collective
Statement” effectively communicated the oppression and concerns of particular women
439 Clyde Wilcox, “Blacks and the New Christian Right: Support for the Moral Majority and Pat Robertson among Washington, D.C. Blacks,” Review of Religious Research 32, no. 1 (September 1990), 43–55.
197 (mostly white, middle-class women in the former and mostly working-class, lesbian
African American women in the latter).440 Critiques of identity politics problematize the
exclusionary nature of categories of identity. How we conceive race, gender, and
sexuality, for example, typically regulates and normalizes those categories to the point of
excluding, or obscuring, other mutually constitutive identities, such as class, ability, and
religion. The reclamation or valorization of stigmatized identities, such as black racial
identity or gay, lesbian, bisexual or transgender identity, is a crucial step toward
demanding social and political equality, however. Further, LGBT Christians demonstrate
that marginalized and dominant identities can jointly form the basis of affirming
epistemologies and the impetus for political action.
Yet, as the limitations of LGBT intervention into dominant antigay Christian
discourse has shown, the problem with using experience as evidence is that it addresses
the effects of stigma and provides new language (e.g., African American or black instead
of Negro, gay or lesbian instead of homosexual) but does little to disrupt the ideological
systems that made the stigma seem “natural” or normative. In the words of historian Joan
Scott’s 1991 essay: “the project of making experience visible precludes critical examination of the workings of the ideological system itself, its categories of representation (homosexual/heterosexual, man/woman, black/white, as fixed immutable identities), its premises about what these categories mean and how they operate, and of its notions of subjects, origins and cause.”441 Scott was troubled by the problem of
experience for historians, particularly as it pertained to what she termed “the history of
440 Combahee River Collective, “A Black Feminist Statement”; Betty Friedan, The Feminine Mystique (New York: Norton, 1963). 441 Scott, “The Evidence of Experience,” 778.
198 difference, the history, that is, of the designation of ‘other,’ of the attribution of
characteristics that distinguish categories of people from some presumed (and usually
unstated) norm.”442 Scott rightly argued that focusing on the experiences of minorities,
for example, gays and lesbians or people of color, prevented interrogation and disruption
of the conditions of their marginalization.
Of course, Scott’s analysis did not extend to a “history of likeness” that is, of the
attribution of characteristics that constitute those presumed norms, an examination that
might have included the role of dominant forms of Christianity in perpetuating norms.
She did not scrutinize the ideological system that undergirds dominant historical
narratives, for example, histories of the American Revolution that minimize violence and
discrimination based on race, gender, and religious difference. Doing so would have
demonstrated how the presumption of normativity also “precludes critical examination of
the workings of” white supremacy, particularly through the deployment of Christian
conviction. Applied to the wave of right-wing religion that coincided with identity
politics, Scott’s critique of the kinds of knowledge that the evidence of experience
facilitates might also have led to more sophisticated analyses of why the so-called “moral
majority” overshadowed the evangelical left.443 Even so, it indicates that scholars of
religion must go beyond the sincerity of its practitioners to consideration of the potential
effects of their utopian visions of society. That kind of interrogation of Christian belief is
important because academic construction of religion often too easily dismiss the conflicts
442 Ibid., 773. 443 David R. Swarz, Moral Minority: The Evangelical Left in an Age of Conservatism (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania, 2014); Tina Fetner, How the Religious Right Shaped Lesbian and Gay Activism (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota, 2008).
199 and contradictions in American Christianity. In the words of Robert Orsi:
. . . the normative account of real religion that took shape within the academy or at the anxious intersection of the academy with the extravagance of American religious life excluded from the study of religion ugly, violent, or troublesome matters (although it certainly does this). Rather the entire notion of “religion” had been carefully demarcated to preserve it from ambivalence and ambiguity, from anything not in accordance with certain sanctioned notions of self and society . . . the possibility that religion can transgress these various dualities, that it does its cultural, psychological, and political work precisely by disregarding boundaries between one self and another, or between past, present and future, or between the natural and the supernatural, is disallowed.444
Conservative evangelicals largely subordinated “boundaries” and differences arising from
the multiplicity of doctrines, denominations, and worship styles that constitute them in
order to become a powerful, multiracial voting bloc in the 1980s. What is also true is that
attention to people of color in conservative evangelicalism complicates our understanding
of the power of faith to overcome difference. White conservatives mythologized a return
to America’s past, while conservatives of color largely focused on social issues, sexual
morality, and the difference Jesus Christ had made in their lives. Together, they
demonstrated that religion is a network of relationships that affirm who people aspire to
be as much as how they live the ideals of their faith tradition.445
The Religious Right, like Right-Wing Republican conservatism, reinvented itself
by creating a narrative of moral outrage over progressive politics and longing for return
to a mythical time in which the United States exemplified “Godly principles.” Yet,
outrage and longing are affective responses that do not bypass logic as much as create a
rationale that feeds them. Ann Burlein’s 2002 monograph compared right-wing white
444 Orsi, Between Heaven and Earth, 187. 445 This focus on religion as relationships is inspired by Robert Orsi’s study of the consequences of bonds between human beings and holy figures which defined “religion as a network of relationships between heaven and earth.” Orsi, Between Heaven and Earth, 2–3.
200 supremacist groups with the more mainstream Religious Right and argued that both won
converts by using religion “to touch people’s hearts and minds, their love for family and
worlds, those tender spaces of intimacy and trust that are so sacred in the fragility of their
power—only to turn this openness into violence, into supremacy, into hatred.”446 Burlein
argued that “grief is also at the heart of right-wing conspiracy theories, whose appeal has as much to do with managing loss, enabling people to acknowledge, and to refuse loss at
one and the same time.”447 She argued for dismantling the silent curricula with which
teachers distinguish, for example, history that does not explicitly attend to race and
gender by reserving special days for readings by and about women, queers, and people of
color. For Burlein, scholars have a responsibility “to disidentify from the histories that
inform us by confronting the curious, paradoxical, and often just plain old painful ways
that the structures of power we oppose ‘out there’ are also ‘inside’ ourselves—and usually in ways that make them difficult to recognize as structures of power.”448 Because
silence can be a collusive response to supremacist logic, “disidentification can be a
practice of faithfulness” to other religious ideals, such as equality, justice, and love.449
This chapter focused on evangelical Christianity as a network of relationships
between people whose humanity is presumed and those who have had to prove their
humanity within American racial and religious history. LGBT Christians were especially
troubling to conservative Christians because they revealed the instability of Christian
identity: the same faith had been marshalled as easily by groups opposed to equality for
446 Burlein, Lift High The Cross, xv. 447 Ibid., xiv. 448 Ibid., xii. 449 Ibid., xiii.
201 queer people and people of color as by those whose faith inspired them to fight for
equality. Queer Christians urged other believers to interrogate the appropriation of
religion’s power in American culture, as a political strategy and much as Christian
leaders in the civil rights movement had done. The chapter examined political uses of
religion and recognized religion as one way that people attempt to negotiate changing
racial and sexual norms. Even though the post-civil-rights movement known variously as the Religious Right, right-wing evangelicalism, and conservative evangelicalism demonstrated that conservative Christianity functioned as a discourse of moral and political rectitude among people of all races who opposed gay rights, it also revealed that the profession and performance of Christian identity constituted a new brand of evangelism, as believers united across difference to fight shifting conceptions of race, gender, and sexuality. Conservative Christians’ moral vision for the country and understanding and application of their faith’s most cherished ideals were deeply informed by their own relationship to American histories of race and sexuality. Ultimately, like
LGBT Christians, they revealed that private and civil religion are inextricably linked and deeply fraught with America’s yet unfulfilled promises of liberty and equality.
202 Conclusion
Inasmuch as the radical uprising of the Stonewall Rebellion was the defining act
of the modern movement to end state-sanctioned homophobic violence and discrimination, the emergence of Christian ministries devoted to the spiritual well-being
of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender Americans constitutes the radical reimagining
of Christian belief and belonging by LGBT people of faith. The battle to advance a pro-
LGBT faith narrative illuminates growing awareness that the civil rights movement was
insufficient as a model for LGBT equality for two important reasons: its work was not
complete and African Americans differed enormously in social identity and political
opinion. Therefore, it was not enough to link race and sexuality by highlighting black
gays, as James Tinney thought useful. The challenges faced by Reverend Troy Perry and
the Universal Fellowship of Metropolitan Community Churches indicate that claiming
Christian Identity was not enough to overcome faith-based homophobia. LGBT
Christians, like other minorities, often challenged their marginalization by attempting to use their vulnerability to harm as a framework for shifting social and religious power.
Even if conservatives never fully affirmed their sexuality, LGBT Christians genuinely believed that God’s love would compel nongay Christians to eventually embrace them and even convert non-Christian gays and lesbians to new life in Jesus Christ. Faith in
God’s love did not equip them to anticipate the way their nonaffirming Christian siblings would adapt by creating new coalitions across lines of race, denomination, and doctrine to retain the privileges of heterosexism. Neither did they fully expect the hostility to religion among gays and lesbians who were enraged by the demonization endured from figures such as Anita Bryant. James Tinney expressed his frustration regarding both in an
203 address to the National March for Lesbian and Gay Rights in San Francisco, California, on July 15, 1984. First, Tinney criticized “those of us in the lesbian/gay movement [who] think that we can change people to our way of thinking by appealing only to their sense of human rights—while avoiding all mention of their religious beliefs.”450 (Reverend Ken
South echoed Tinney fifteen years later when South admonished LGBT activists not to yield their faith to religious bigots at the 1999 Creating Change Conference, reminding them that: “Your thirst for justice and equality came from early understandings of God’s love for you and your responsibility to your neighbor.”451) Tinney was especially frustrated by the mean-spiritedness of conservatives during the AIDS epidemic because antigay preachers claimed the disease evidenced God’s wrath against homosexuals.
Tinney therefore included a message to his “Christian right-wing friends:”
I make no apologies whatsoever for the fact that I too am a fundamentalist, an evangelical, and that I live my life in allegiance to Jesus Christ as my Lord. I am a born-again homosexual; but I am a homosexual still[.] And I am not alone. There are thousands of other gay Christians throughout this country, some of whom are here today. Others are worshipping this very moment in churches across the land. They represent separate, formal, national organizations of gay Methodist, gay Pentecostal, gay Southern Baptist as well as many more denominational caucuses and support groups. It is on their behalf that I appeal to you, my fellow Christians, to consider the effects of your stance. When you oppose gay rights, you are opposing the lives of those of us who are your Christian brothers and sisters, who happen to be gay.452
Tinney warned that by fighting human rights for gays and lesbians, conservative
Christians were causing gay Christians to lose jobs and homes and to suffer violence and even death. Tinney therefore asked:
my fellow evangelical Christians (who are not gay) . . . to remember that what you think of as the “Gay Movement” is not only comprised of some who are
450 Printed in Bridges: The Evangelical Outreach Ministries Newsletter VII, no. 4, November 1984. 451 The National Gay and Lesbian Task Force: 12th Annual Creating Change Conference. 452 Ibid.
204 lawless and unbelieving, but it also includes those of us who are born-again, gay Christians, sincerely and earnestly seeking to live out the faith and exemplify God’s will for our lives. [. . .] Which brings me to my final appeal, to my non-gay evangelical fellow Christians. Have you ever considered how difficult you are making it for those of us who are ministering and serving and preaching in the gay communities of this nation? Have you ever thought about how we have to bear the repercussions, the fallout, from your anti-gay tirades—in terms of added barriers to our witness, and increased hostility to the Gospel? [. . .] I beseech you, I beg you, in the name of Him who “so loves” us all so much, if you cannot support us, please stop fighting us.453
Tinney, here, evidenced his faith in an essential Christianity that should have united
nongay and gay evangelicals. Yet, conservative evangelicals remained unreceptive to
LGBT Christians and rejected efforts to equate discrimination based on sexual orientation
with racial discrimination. Tinney and other LGBT Christians, who imagined that
reclaiming their faith would lead to the end of faith-based homophobia, learned instead
that Christianity was a site of contested beliefs about race, gender, and sexuality. Popular
narratives of the civil rights movement did not elucidate the ongoing political
implications of the simple gospel and the social gospel, even though events like the
bombing of 16th Street Baptist Church revealed that biblical principles lend themselves as easily to sustaining discrimination as challenging it.
African American gays and lesbians who also identified as people of faith fought the erasure of their identities from black politics and challenged conservative Christians within their communities to embrace them. African American LGBT Christians did not organize by denomination as much as from a political sensibility arising from the
intersection of race and sexuality. In 1998, a coalition of black activists held an
educational booth and organized a “community speak out” at the Congressional Black
453 Ibid.
205 Caucus, a national event that draws African Americans from across the country to
Washington, DC, every fall. Their presence was strategic. According to long-time lesbian
activist and field consultant for the National Black Lesbian and Gay Leadership Forum,
Mandy Carter, “the black Lesbian, Gay, bisexual and transgendered [sic] community has
been and always will be here, but we have to be more pro-actively visible [. . .] we should
be at every black event that takes place and not be so insular in our Gay world.”454
Explicitly addressing the antigay rhetoric of conservative Christians, Dr. Sylvia Rhue
said of the fight for gay rights, “We are fighting a religious war and we can’t win it
fighting with just secular tools.” Rhue, founder of Woman Vision, coproduced All God’s
Children, the 1996 award-winning film that explored the spiritual lives of black gays and
lesbians and highlighted an unprecedented number of interviews with prominent black
Christian and political leaders, including Reverend Jesse Jackson, Reverend James
Forbes, Reverend Carol L. Murray, Congresswoman Maxine Waters, Senator Carol
Moseley-Braun, Mayor Ken Reeves, and Cornel West.455 Gay clergy were also
instrumental. Carter and Reverend Cedric Harmon, associate field director at Americans
United for Separation of Church and State, were members of People of Color/Faith
Working Group, a subgroup of Equal Partners in Faith, a program created in 1997 to
counter Christian conservatism with progressive Christian voices. Together, Carter and
Harmon organized a community rally at St. Margaret’s Episcopal Church, one of two
gay-sponsored events during the Congressional Black Caucus. Harmon argued that
454 Rhonda Smith, “Fighting a Religious War: Congressional Black Caucus, Christian Coalition Targeted for Black Gay Efforts,” Washington Blade (September 11, 1998), 29, no. 37: 1, 24. 455 All God’s Children was A Woman Vision Production, produced in 1996 in association with the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force and the National Black Lesbian and Gay Leadership Forum by Dr. Dee Mosbacher and Frances Reid and Dr. Sylvia Rhue.
206 Christian conservatives used the issue of sexuality to gain favor with black Christians
who opposed gay rights and to deflect attention from creating educational and economic
opportunity for African Americans. Harmon and other black LGBT activists called on
people of color in attendance to “become informed about the Christian Coalition, their
interest in our community, their conservative views on school vouchers and affirmative action [in order to] unmask who they are what their real political agenda is and say
‘That’s not an agenda that has our best interest at heart.’”456 Ultimately, however,
conservative white evangelicals and black and Latino evangelicals continued to work
together as the body of Christ and to argue that antiblack racism and homophobia were
not the same kind of prejudice.
The evangelicals examined in Faith’s Queer Pleasures demonstrate that an
intersectional theory of Christian Identity might lead to more sophisticated analysis of
faith-based activism and the political implications of Christians equating their beliefs
about race, gender, and sexuality with God’s will for the United States. Moreover, they
called attention to how American Christian Identity both creates and reflects the social power of its practitioners, particularly when the dominance of conservative evangelical
Christianity silences the voices of believers on the margins of the tradition. In this way,
evangelical religion—which references the tradition of evangelizing, or telling people
what they should believe—calls attention not only to church doctrines and denominations
but to the fact that Americans use religion to translate their responses to changing race,
sexuality, and gender norms into sincere expressions of belief that facilitate political
belonging and civic engagement.
456 Smith, Fighting a Religious War.”
207 The profession of belief in Jesus Christ, and the performance of that belief, provided LGBT people another strategy in the fight against bigotry and for acceptance.
Therefore, one of the pleasures to which Faith’s Queer Pleasures refers is the ability to create a self-affirming subjectivity from the intersection of mutually constitutive identities that are produced through each other and yield privilege and oppression simultaneously: Christian Identity (which implies, if not moral rectitude, then aspiration thereto) and experiences of stigmatization. Christians on both sides of the gay rights struggle evidenced this pleasure through the politics of Christian Identity: antigay
Christians used faith to police the parameters of the beloved community while gay- affirming Christians sought to expand it to include LGBT people. Thus, “Christian” is an unstable category of identity; it includes people whose faith inspires not only multiple doctrines and liturgical traditions, but conflicting social politics as well. In other words, believers reiterate their relationship to other forms of power by asserting evangelical
Christian identity.
The sexual diversity within American evangelical Christianity, although under- studied, invites us to reject the LGBT/Christian binary and to analyze the intersection of identities of conservative and progressive faith-based activism. Whether for or against the rights of LGBT people, Christian activists revealed that Christian assertions of morality and ethics are ultimately distillations of beliefs about the social significance of race, gender, sexuality, and other categories of identity. We can best understand and, when necessary, combat the pleasures of Christianity by looking at the values believers use their faith to reiterate.
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