I want to share with you some thoughts about the church, and about its
resistance to include and recognise those who are out of the dominant system.
The title is a claim that the church itself is locked inside of the closet.
Lets us reflect what does it means for the church to be `in the closet`, making
a parallel with the experience of many gays and lesbians, and how they can help
the church in the `outing` process.
To be “in” or “out of the closet” are expressions that are often used by the
gay community in many parts of the world. Meaning to be open or not open about
our sexual orientation. The cultural and religious environments where each one
finds themselves influences greatly the decision to be “in” or “out”. In Brazil
for example, it has been slowly changing, but it is still difficult to be open
and face all the stigma and rejection from a macho dominant society, where
according to the gay group of Bahia, three hundred gays and lesbians have been
killed in homophobic attacks over a period of three years; an average of one
hundred deaths per year. However, Brazilian society has been vulnerable to
change, and those changes have made life for gays and lesbians much better, but
this number of deaths shows that we still have a long way to go to find
acceptance.
Most of the stigma that gay people find in Brazil is deeply rooted in our Roman
Catholic heritage, and also in fundamentalist evangelical movements. On the
other hand, the Anglican Church, and also the Lutherans have been more open to
discuss the issue, and open their doors for LGBT folks. However, it is
important to state that changes do not happen until people come out of the
closet. In order to challenge and change society and the church, it is
necessary to face and recognise our own reality, even if in the beginning
martyrdom becomes an inevitable fate.
Coming out of the closet, according to R. Cleaver, is an act of naming oneself
as somebody out of the dominant system, which defines the social roles, in this
case, from the biological gender. This is an act of untying secrets and
silence, and feeling free.
But what does my title mean, claiming that the Church itself is in the closet?
To be in the closet, is an attitude of conformity within the present system, or
even conformity with one’s own reality. For gay Brazilians, to be in the closet
makes life to a large extent a lot easier; but on the other hand it maintains a
life with feelings of non-wholeness. To be out of the closet in Latin America
still means to face life threats, to lose jobs, to be forced out of home. To be
thrown out of home, in a strong family oriented society is one of the biggest
punishments one can receive. But, things do not change unless we break the
silence, unless we give a name to our reality and ourselves. That is the only
way to engender history, build identity, and create a counter culture movement.
A “church in the closet” means basically the same as what it means for gay
people. It is a church that is afraid to exercise its prophetic role; it is a
church that conforms to the socio-political reality, while it denies its
vocation to be a counter cultural movement. To give a recent example of this,
we can look at the huge mobilization of many sectors of the Anglican Communion
in favour or against the new developments on homosexuality. If huge
mobilizations, like these, were done to tackle issues of human justice,
poverty, or against wars and denials of human rights in many countries, surely
the world would become a better place to live. But we do not see mobilization
happening in the same way for those issues. We do see it when the issue is what
somebody does in his or her private life, in his or her bedroom.
Morals and moralism are two concepts that are often mixed up by the church, and
as she creates a monastery to lock herself in, she is unable to tackle the real
issues that go on in the real world. One of the main excuses I have heard for
not accepting gay people in the church, relates to the problem it would create
for the church in many countries dominated by Muslims and other religious
groups which have maintained a strong patriarchal oriented culture. That is to
be in the closet. It is a comfortable situation to sacrifice beliefs of human
justice in order to keep a comfortable position within society, trying to be
part of the dominant system. In this way, we should ask, how faithful we are to
Christ’s teaching, as he himself would be “Out of the Closet”, out of the
dominant system, otherwise he would not be able to challenge it. Things would
have remained just as they were.
A church in the closet is a church that maintains the western negative attitude
towards the body and sexuality. It is a church that maintains heterosexual
paradigms, and gives legitimacy to its structure of power through the religious
moralist discourse adopted throughout centuries. The roots of these paradigms
lie mostly in the dualist concepts that were adopted by many theologians after
the fifth century of the Christian era. Sexuality lost its ‘pleasure-giver’
identity, and became confined to a procreation purpose. Silence was imposed on
women, in the same way as it is imposed on gay people, because they represent a
danger for the established mentality that fragments our lives, and demonises
pleasure. Pleasure becomes a sign of evil, and suffering becomes the path to
holiness. The body denial, in order to make the spirit alive, is a concept that
is indeed intrinsically part of our mentality, and the western sadistic
attitude towards human sexuality.
Looking back at our Latin American reality, the Gospel brought by the
Portuguese and Spanish colonisers to Latin America, did not entirely mean Good
News for the inhabitants of this part of the world who held a variety of
attitudes towards human sexuality. They may well have worshipped their gods
naked, engaged in tribal politics naked; there was no shame, no guilty feeling.
Suddenly the Jesuit missionaries came and said to them: “You must dress up!”
They taught them the Gospel, and gave them clothes to wear. Later, came the
Protestants missionaries, mainly from North America, and Europe; really
over-dressed for that tropical climate! They worked in the same way: “You must
dress up!” They also gave the locals clothes, and taught them to be ashamed of
their bodies, of their sexuality.
However, it was difficult for the church to maintain its moralist teaching in
this context. It was indeed difficult for the clergy to keep an eye on what was
going on in each one’s bedrooms, they started the inquisition, and many Jews as
well as many accused of sodomy were burnt or hanged. It was a type of
Christianity inside of the closet, which legitimised the socio-political
structure, and did not dare to speak out against the power-abuse by those who
governed our nation.
Soon, with the abolishment of the monarchy in Brazil, the church lost its
position alongside the state, but the military junta that came afterwards just
reaffirmed the male heterosexual system of thought and practices. Many people
were silenced again, and unless they broke their silence their voices would not
be heard. The church in this new situation was to some extent driven out of the
closet, its silence and conformity were broken through liberation theology.
Oppression was challenged, and the church played an important part in
demolishing a system that the church itself had supported in the beginning,
when communism was thought to be the main enemy. But this “coming out of the
closet” did not endure for too long, soon the church turned back again to
conformity. What was thought to be a big and permanent “outing”, was actually
just another act of keeping its trust in a nation that could no longer support
so much oppression, but at the same time kept women and gay people silenced, as
well as maintaining the structure of power which is the main criteria
responsible for so much imbalance in our society.
Gays and Lesbians represent indeed a testing case for the church. To accept
those who are out of the dominant system means that the church itself will
consequently be in the same position. However it is time for the silence to be
broken in every sense. The world cannot wait any longer; those who are
suffering cannot wait any longer. It is time for the church to exercise its
prophetic calling and address the real issues that are going on in our society.
Gays and lesbians have an important part to play in this “outing” process. They
indeed have an important part to play to get the church out of the “monastery
built in our minds” that makes us conform to a culture of death and
destruction. For this to be possible, we need first to create an “outing
theology”. A theology born of our own reality, our own struggle, and question
deeply the old paradigms that proved to be just a way to legitimise the current
system.
Again, things do not change unless silence is broken. It is necessary for an
“outing” to happen in order for people to build their own history, and recover
dignity. We must pay attention to the narratives of those who are oppressed,
and those who are oppressed must break their silences and conquer their own
liberation. Women, and gays and lesbians cannot remain silent and marginalized,
while the dominant class domesticate God and the bible for the purposes and
interests in their political and hegemonic economical projects.
It is necessary for our voices to be heard, and we should re-read the bible
from our own reality to build a theology of “outing” that might help the church
to get itself out of the closet and face the true problems of the world today.
Outing is a difficult process and it is true that not everybody that fights
against their conflicts of inadequacy, facing the models offered by society,
gets to reach a conscious level of their differences, up to the point of
building their identity based on new parameters still to be discovered. This
conflict of inadequacy becomes even more difficult to deal with, when it is the
result of a religious system, where sexual pleasure is regarded as sinful, and
its only purpose is procreation. Therefore, to create an “outing” theology, it
is necessary to focus on the doctrine of the Grace of God, or a theology, as,
of the “original blessing” rather than “original sin”. The theology of original
sin was good enough to create a society dominated by shame and guilt, and
locked not only gays and lesbians, but also “straight” people inside of the
closet.
Andre Musskopf, a young Brazilian theologian from a Lutheran Background, points
out the difficulties of the current theological establishment, where our
spirituality is disassociated of corporeity or embodiment, mainly because it is
a sign of weakness that goes against the principles of success laid upon the
Latino male. In this, he points to the contradictions between the gay world and
the religious world, mainly due to the difficulties caused by the dogmas of sin
and grace, where sinfulness is often associated with sexual expression outside
of the procreation purpose within a traditional marriage setting. Therefore, a
need arises to look for a new hermeneutical methodology to address the reality
experienced by those who find themselves alienated from the traditional
marriage standards. This new hermeneutics focuses on the re-reading of the
Bible by gay folks, who should interpret it within their own reality. This is
not new, since re-reading the Bible from ones reality has already been
encouraged by Latin American Liberation Theologians. Although it does not
intend to focus on finding scriptural legitimacy for their way of live, it is
at least intended to focus on healing of those traumas caused by oppression and
exclusion.
To do this it is necessary to explore a theology of the “outing experience” or
a theology that faces all the challenges of getting out of the closet. A
theology that causes rupture between the lack of models, when the old ones are
outdated or irrelevant to tackle oppression, and the construction of new ones.
The identity construction began with the process of naming oppression, and it
is a way to define those who are out of the dominant system. To deny oneself
identity is to deny the doctrine of salvation by grace. The doctrine of
salvation by the grace of God becomes, to Musskopf, fundamental to a “theology
out of the closet”, where acceptance is found regardless of one’s identity, and
creates a rupture with the socially institutionalised homophobia.
Marcella Althaus-Reid , an Argentinean theologian, in her book “Indecent
Theology”, presents the dominant systematic theology as an arbitrary sexual
theory with divine implications (88). Between the two ways of talking about
“sex”: either as a gender identity or as sexual activity, the feminist
liberation theologian usually prefers the first. However, sex, as desire or
concupiscence was the dominant preoccupation of official theology through the
centuries, in reality, with the intention of condemning the “Concupiscent
desires of the flesh”. When theology addressed sin and grace, it had it’s eyes
constantly turned towards bed and bathrooms, and not a preoccupation with real
moral issues, out of the established moralism, that makes the church lose the
main focus or purpose of its existence in the world.
In all this transformation process, we should try to pay attention to the
narratives of all those who are oppressed, and not just to our own, although I
believe that the gay and Lesbian issue is indeed a testing case, which can make
the Church re-evaluate its own dogmas and its own position in the world.
Whether “in” or “out” of the closet, I really hope it will be out, even it
means a hard path to be followed, as it indeed can be, as it has been for many
who lost their lives because they chose to be truly themselves, and not to
conform with the dominant system.
Finally, to end this talk, we should consider what Mathew Fox’s says to each
one of us: “the gay who wants to make a spiritual contribution to society will
do it the way all others do: by non-repressive sublimation of working for
other’s pleasure and service. In other words, prophecy will play just as
important a role in the gay’s life-style and consciousness as will the sensual.
Because gays are so often excluded from society’s institutions (like women
are), we can hopefully depend on them to offer alternative institutions - ones
that are more sensual, more alive and quickening than those we have inherited”
.
And he goes on saying that Gays and Lesbians should indeed get out of the
closet “not only for their personal pride and sense of personal worth, but also
for the sake of society’s and church’s* that have been dominated by a
senseless, a-sensual and sadistic sense. If each one were to get out of the
closet, we may be able to build a new theology where sexual pleasure is
recovered, and the church gets out of the safety of the closet to exercise its
ministry in the world and for the world.