Despicable Me

I grew up in a seaside town. Every summer, as others squeezed families into cars and headed for the ferries, we stayed put. Towards the end of the school holiday, students would arrive and pitch a tent on the greensward. They were there on behalf of the Scripture Union to run a beach mission. To a serious and religiose child like me, their arrival was a cause of great excitement. The first time I went to the mission, I was seven years old. Weekday mornings began with a 7 am Bible study. It was at one of those study sessions in the early Eighties that I had my one and only experience of someone discussing biblical attitudes to homosexuality. The leader of the study was called Ann, a student teacher from Sunderland. “I work” she said “with some people who are gay. They are very nice. They invited me to dinner. You could tell they really loved each other. They almost persuaded me that being gay was alright. But I prayed and was able to place my trust in scripture.” She looked, momentarily, sad. She had looked into the abyss and backed away. It was the first time I saw a faithful Christian struggling with how to reconcile the Gospel injunction to commit ourselves to the love of others with what seemed to her to be a scriptural requirement to hate.

What she feared was the slippery slope that we were constantly being warned against. We should not, under any circumstances, pick and choose the parts of scripture we were prepared to adhere to. We were fundamentalists. Of course, as many point out, there were all sorts of Biblical proscriptions and prescriptions that we seemed, in practice, perfectly prepared to overlook. For some, no doubt, the desire to emphasise the verses forbidding homosexual intercourse whilst ignoring the sometimes bewilderingly archaic Old Testament strictures that surround them was motivated by a pre-existing prejudice. Ann did not want to hate anyone, but she could not find a way to reconcile her faith with her natural instinct to love.

I, on the other hand, was a bigot. I avoided cognitive dissonance with a glib evasion: I hated the sin but loved the sinner. A Christian Union man, I could be found at university asking Stephen Twigg to accept that whilst Christians could not condone his sexuality, they could not be convicted of bigotry. It was what their faith required. I asked, in effect, for his sympathy for our predicament. I am ashamed.

I knew my glib distinction between sin and sinner made little sense. I understood, in truth, that being gay was a matter of identity. I just made sure I kept those discomforting thoughts at the periphery of my mental vision. I was guilty of a repellent cowardice. I chose to stand aside as others suffered.

Eventually the tatty superstructure of my arguments against love collapsed, as I suppose it was always bound to. I wish I could say that I tore it down. I didn’t. It decayed, sagged and disintegrated as the part of my mind dedicated to defending the indefensible grew weary and withdrawn.

I am not ashamed of my faith. I am ashamed of myself.

I want to say two things. To those with whom I share my faith I want to ask you to question whether you really believe God calls you to hate. Does the fear and isolation our attitudes have visited upon gay people strike you as something Jesus would want us to be inflicting?

To my gay friends I want to say sorry. I have done nothing to deserve your friendship but it is precious.

4 thoughts on “Despicable Me”

  1. Laudable apology… but re: the third-last paragraph – why are you not ashamed of your faith, but ashamed of yourself? It was your faith which encouraged your prejudice and bigotry, as it does for millions less able to challenge its strictures than you are. You should be ashamed of your faith for this.

  2. Wow. I’m incredibly moved by the honesty and self-examination of this post.

    Can I be really presumptuous and make a reply to yarb? I won’t be offended if you don’t publish the comment.

    Yarb – I should say that I’m not trying to speak for Moobs, and as someone who hasn’t by any stretch reconciled her faith with the Catholic Church, and is unlikely to, I’m not trying to be an apologist.

    My response to what Moobs has written though is this. I read someone who has reconciled his faith with what his conscience tells him is truth. It is not his faith which led him to prejudice, it was a version of an expression of faith which was not his own. That’s why I’m so impressed by this post, because looking your own belief in the face, breaking it down and rebuilding it honestly is a gargantuan task.

    Whoever is doing the ‘better’ thing is not for me to say, but I do know this. It’s easier and lighter for me to reject (which is pretty much what I do Church-wise) than it is to reconcile. I’m not going to change the Church or the world from my moral comfort zone, but Moobs just might.

  3. Nicely written examination of your soul and why you were wrong in the past. Like yarb says though I never understand how one can uphold a certain faith, say Catholicism and then say, but of course I am against abortion, I am for gay marriage, I think people should use contraception and I don’t think I am going to roast in hell for all eternity if I get divorced……etc etc. It’s something that doesn’t really make sense to me!

  4. sorry my bad! I meant ‘not against abortion’ of course
    what I mean can a religion be a pick and mix or do you have to swallow the whole thing?

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