LGBTQ+ Rights and Religion

There are a lot of churches. Some would still have the big stuff without the annoying bad stuff. People are just a bit lazy and creatures of habit. Unless something really bugs them they will probably stay.

Not to mention the geographic and social factors when it comes to choosing a church. It's difficult to leave a church where your family's a part of its community, and go out by yourself to another church a different distance away.

Well, unless you go from Catholic to Lutheran. They tend to build their churches across the street from each other around here.

If you view a church as no different than a social club or political party, then I can see the reasoning. You take the good stuff and either ignore the bad stuff or try to change it. But don't members of a church/religion/denomination believe that their own thing is perfectly and divinely ordained? Are there any religions out there that say that it's all right to make up your own mind about these sort of things? Doesn't membership in a religion require the members to subsume their own reason and conscience to that of the hierarchy?

Only when it comes to the core tenents, pretty much everything beyond that is up for interpretation. And by cor tenennts I mean the realy basic stuff, as in Jesus was born and lived and died to save us, he is/was also part of/the son of God.

And even that's not entirely held to, I know a vicar who refers to Christmas as a story, a very important story but a story nonetheless.

Hell even beyond that it happens, I'm a baptised Christian who went to a carol service last week and I'm not entirely sure that God exists. The membership requirements for religions are bloody lax.

edited 19th Dec '14 7:55:44 PM by SilasW

No. We went back and forth on this for a really long time last time you asked this, too.

Dogma is the part that you're supposed to accept without argument, and there is vanishingly little of it. Even some of the recent dogma (infallibility) has been very, very hotly contested. Concepts like biblical inerrancy are local to extreme evangelical sects that up until the last few decades were not even all that visible outside the Southern US.

A denomination will have official stances, and will usually claim as much authority as it can get away with in enforcing it — but ultimately, this is supposed to be a faith of conscience and good will. If we think our leadership is wrong about something as they have been many, many times before, we're going to argue it because we want to get it right, and we want them to get it right. God has no use for faith that is willfully blind.

edited 19th Dec '14 9:05:16 PM by Pykrete

Yeah...blind faith can be extremely dangerous because it's really easy to slip something horrible in there.

Rest assured, the very concept of "subsuming their own reason and conscience to that of the hierarchy" is something the overwhelming majority of us would find utterly repulsive. Our hierarchy has been openly corrupt far too many times for that to ever be a palatable idea, to say nothing of the things we think they're honestly screwing up.

Hence, dissent. Lots and lots of dissent. This is why it's entirely possible to get things like majority support for gay marriage among certain denominations. When the lynchpin of your faith is to be a good person, there's not much room for nodding and going along with your leadership when you think they're doing something horrible to large subsets of your species. There's even less room to let your house turn into a uniform echo chamber by walking out in a huff.

edited 19th Dec '14 9:22:35 PM by Pykrete

I guess the idea of being part of a church while disagreeing with its teachings is an alien concept to me. I was raised being taught that you don't get to pick and choose which parts of your church's teachings to accept or reject because much better and wiser people had already decided the issues before.

I remember going to an "Alpha Course" presentation at my family's church a few years ago. I picked up a pamphlet there called "What is the Christian position on Homosexuality?" In one part of it, the author advocated for conversion therapy and cited a 1955 article in The Lancet. I was horrified at this, because homosexuality is not a mental illness and conversion therapy has been opposed by every major medical and psychological organization in the US and Europe for decades.

Was I wrong to conclude that this must be what Christians actually believe? I never really thought much about gay rights until after I had quit religion, but I do remember hearing the horrible things that prominent Christian leaders said and continue to say about LGBT people (among other things) and compared that to what I actually knew, and I came to realize that I couldn't be a Christian if that's what Christians are like.

Well, there's your mistake. The Alpha Course has a very definite slant to it that is very evangelical in nature. It doesn't reflect every branch of Christianity. Or every church within a branch. <_<

Frankly, you got the "welcome to a right wing, almost-cult" version of Christian.

Just believe us when we say there's a wide range of "being Christian", mate. I know that most of the Anglican vicars I've met don't really appreciate it. Even if they don't outright condemn it (they spend a lot of time correcting various misconceptions that thing spreads).

edited 20th Dec '14 4:47:32 AM by Euodiachloris

I had to leave my church. When the pastor says that people like you will burn in hell for eternity, and the congregation agrees, there's no reasoning with that. I started going to a different church next Sunday. Ultimately I realized that agnostic better described my beliefs about God and all the rest, and I gave up on church altogether.

edited 20th Dec '14 5:54:56 AM by Morgikit

The church I grew up in never discussed it. At least not that I was aware. Of course, there were plenty of teenage boys calling me "queer" and so on, even though I'm not, so I grew up with the idea that being "gay" was a pejorative.

But after moving on to college and eventually learning there was nothing wrong with it, I came to learn about people like Fred Phelps, Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson, James Dobson and others. What struck me was how they were the loudest voices, and there didn't appear to be any opposition to them whatsoever. At best, others would oppose their methods or choice of language, but never the actual substance. So for most of my life I never heard a single prominent Christian leader speak up and say that people like that were just outright wrong. Silence is complicity, after all.

Someone want to link to the Pope's comments on how we shouldn't judge homosexuals or should I dig up a link myself? Edit: Did it myself[1]

Right-wing crazy American evangelical churches are not representative of Christianity as a whole, they are representative of themselves only, despite their claims to the contrary.

It's interesting trying to work out someone's religious stance on certain issues, I'm kinda seeing a girl who was raised very religious but I've got no idea what her church's stance on a lot of issues are (or if she agrees with such stances), I'm not going to assume that they are a particular type just because I know she was raised very religious.

edited 20th Dec '14 10:22:57 AM by SilasW

IIRC the southern evangelicals are the only noticeably large denominations that advocate conversion therapy. And even then, most of them have dropped it by now.

Beyond that, as a Catholic of 27 years, I don't think I've ever heard homosexuality come up in a sermon. There are official positions against homosexuality, but sermons tend to be more along the lines of self-reflection, public works, and addressing poverty. Hell, the only times sexuality comes up in sermons at all are when a Gospel directly talks about prostitutes — and being the Gospel, that's always in the context of "don't be assholes to them".

As for silence against the WBC and Falwell and such...who do you think is opposing them? The overwhelming majority of the US population is some type of Christian. So anytime you have a public majority in favor of gay marriage or anything else, you will necessarily have a very large subset of Christians among them.

The hierarchy tends to be slower on the uptake than the laity about that kind of thing, but even then. Pope Francis just tried to soften our official stance on homosexuality, which already openly condemns bullying, ostracization, and conversion therapy — and when his hyperconservative cardinals shot it down, the backlash in the church was huge. You have entire denominations like Episcopalians who straight-up passed gay marriage. The Archbishop of Canterbury who is kind of a big deal among Anglicans pushed through measures against homophobic bullying in schools. There has been action and silence has been broken. It just doesn't tend to make news, because it doesn't sell as much as Fred Phelps and the 40 or so members of his immediate family picketing funerals and saying tsunamis happen to Japan because God hates gays in America.

edited 20th Dec '14 3:50:55 PM by Pykrete

While actions may speak louder than words, actual spoken words do help. It wasn't really until college that I met Christians who would say out loud that the God they worship welcomes homosexuals into his kingdom (and not just the apologetic self loathing kind you see advocating "therapy"). If the vocal minority is all someone ever hears, then it seems a bit unfair to blame him or her for thinking that's all there is.

The only people I blame for that are the crazies and the sensational news media that glorifies them.

I mean, I've been to the south. I've seen the kind of isolationist echo chambers that get set up there, and it doesn't take much imagination to see why someone who grew up in the middle of it might think everyone's like that.

The history behind those denominations comes down to a very rapid series of very local schisms by groups that each thought the previous one was too liberal — the first of which basically got kicked out of Europe. And for a sense of scale, here's how local it is. That blotch of red shows up in the southeast US, parts of Africa as of recent evangelical pushes (where they somehow manage to combine the most poisonous parts of extremist Christianity and tribal beliefs that shouldn't even be conceptually compatible), and pretty much nowhere else.

And even then, the worst of the problems are caused by even smaller and more local subsets of that, because "Southern Baptist Convention" is almost as much of a wide and misleading catch-all as "Protestant". The SBC is very decentralized, and they tend to have a lot of de facto doctrinal bleedover from the even more extreme Pentecostals.

edited 20th Dec '14 5:25:20 PM by Pykrete

Sure if it's there first experience with religious people outside the local minority I get that, it's just when they've had it explained to them several times by people outside the vocal minority that the local minority don't speak for all that it gets a bit annoying.

As someone who spent their childhood going to church in one of those Texas counties in red on the map Pykrete linked (original which is better quality here, btw◊) I can attest to the SBC pretty much only meaning the church contains "Baptist" in the name and practices believer's baptism by full immersion rather than infant baptism. De Leon, TX has a few different Baptist churches with congregations that generally find fault in the preachings from at least one of the others.

Sure there are people like that. On the other hand, I've also dealt with situations where no matter how hard I try to explain I am only referring to people who are against LGBTs, people who are not against LGBTs take what I say as a personal attack on them. Some people you just can't reason with.

edited 20th Dec '14 6:20:05 PM by Morgikit

It can be hard to believe a couple of people on the internet vs. every example you see in real life that it's a vocal minority. Especially when it's the same view point repeated by media and politicians who win elections. Then it's really hard to take it on faith, no matter how many explanations you get.

Yes indeed. I wonder how many people on this site, or how many people who are part of a religion express beliefs different than their own church's leadership. Because when it comes down to it, all the leaders care about is membership and money. As long as you keep supporting them overtly, it doesn't matter if you covertly disagree with them.

And while there are a lot of people praising Pope Francis, I have yet to see him actually change his church's stance on LGBT rights. He's still opposed to marriage equality. As far as I know he hasn't said anything about equal opportunity in employment, housing or health care. Is he actually doing anything at all?

That's from the Catechism, specifically regarding homosexuals. So...yeah.

As for how many people on this forum support gay marriage, off the top of my head I can think of a grand total of one Catholic and two unspecified Protestants on this thread who had problems with it at all, two of them opposed non-religious legal restrictions, and the third was extreme enough to get banned. So...yeah.

edited 21st Dec '14 9:17:36 PM by Pykrete

Yes, but what does that actually mean? Is there anything in there about legal rights or privileges?

Near as I can tell the official position of the RCC is that LGBT equality is a threat to the church, religious freedom and even civil rights as a whole. This comes from no less a source than William Donohue, the President of the Catholic League. Archbishop Timothy Dolan is a great supporter of his, so I can only conclude that what he says reflects the true doctrine of his church.

http://www.catholicleague.org/church-squeezed-gay-marriage/

"True doctrine" seems like a tricky term to me. If 99% of Catholics believe thing A, then even if the 1% believing B are prominent in the hierarchy couldn't you argue that A is the truer Catholic belief because more Catholics believe it?

Let's ignore for a moment that the Catholic League is not a mouthpiece for the church (they're even explicitly not a mouthpiece for the church), and that Dolan's support and nearby office space on the same floor does not make him one. Dolan is one of the most openly corrupt voices in the hierarchy — hell, he was laundering assets during the sex abuse scandal. This is akin to saying Sheldon Adelson is a mouthpiece for the entire US because Ted Cruz approves of him.

And I say let's ignore it, because if you were to press the issue regardless, this goes back to what I was saying earlier about the Pope's biggest obstacle being his hyperconservative cardinals and archbishops. There's a reason he's been sacking so many of them.

That said, stopped clock — for once, Donohue does have a point in that Denmark did actually force its churches to perform gay marriage, and that pastors today in the US are getting sued for refusing to do the same. While I desperately want the churches to do that of their own volition, forcing them to do so is indeed a threat to the church, religious freedom, and civil rights as a whole. It is any time religious beliefs conflict with legal mandates, and there's rarely any good answer to them that doesn't either screw a lot of people over or provide precedent for a slippery slope.

Birth control, for instance. Public support for birth control among Catholics is in the high 90 percents.

edited 21st Dec '14 10:32:37 PM by Pykrete