Can liberal Christians please stop banging on about gayness?

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/belief/2012/apr/23/liberal-christians-gayness

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Paul Oestreicher expects that many Christians will be shocked by his suggestion that Jesus was gay. Perhaps so, but here is another response: why can't liberal Christians shut up about gayness for a while? Dwelling on the issue is a bad form of Christian communication. The point of Christian communication, or "proclamation", is to interest people in Christianity, to make it seem attractive, inviting, serious. Banging on about gayness puts people off. The more that liberal Christianity seems to be a holy pressure group for gay rights, the less the average person wants anything much to do with it – not because she's homophobic, just because she's not that interested in the issue. A form of religion in which the issue is so prominent is woefully limited.

But we must "bang on" about this, liberals will reply, because the church's position on the issue must change, for the sake of justice. They have a point. The Church of England must end its current policy of official discrimination against its gay clergy, and therefore its official hostility to homosexuality. I am a liberal on this issue.

It is, therefore, a dilemma – a complex and rather fascinating one. Liberal clergy must seek to change the church's policy. But on the other hand they must not allow this cause to determine the very identity of liberal Anglicanism. This is what has happened, over the past two decades. Liberal Anglicanism has been dominated by this cause, and this has weakened it. In particular, I think, it has led straight young men to keep their distance. This is not the sort of claim that can be easily substantiated, but it is surely the case that most young heterosexual men are wary of a subculture that is highly exercised about gay rights. I for one was rather discomfited to find, in my 20s, just how many liberal Anglican clergy were gay, and how the issue dominated discussions; it partly led me to keep my distance from church culture.

The underlying issue is that the relationship between Christianity and maleness has always been a bit tricky. This religion is pretty tough on the obvious male propensities: aggression, greed, cool scepticism, sexual pride. It encourages certain attitudes that contravene adult maleness: contrition, admission of vulnerability and weakness, empathy, and so on. Aren't these womanly qualities? Isn't this whole religion … a bit gay?

A key part of evangelicalism's (relatively successful) strategy has been to privilege straight male leadership. The "unmanliness" of Christianity is balanced by an insistence that the church values traditional male authority. The young Christian man might be perceived as unmanly by his peers, for avoiding premarital sex, and singing about his devotion to Jesus, but there is something to compensate for this: he is handed a traditional male identity, a haven from the ravages of sex-related indeterminacy.

Before women priests, this dynamic was echoed throughout the church. The maleness of the priestly role was a counterbalance to the unmanly aspect of Christianity. This is really why the church has had such a bitterly hard time with sexuality and gender. Without its traditional privileging of straight maleness, there is nothing to counteract the old suspicion that religion is really for gays and women.

Liberal Christians should acknowledge that the cause of equality for homosexuals can have a quasi-religious tinge. Some gay Christians imply that there is a special relationship between homosexuality and faith (see Gene Robinson's memoir). Do homosexuals not have special experience of the courage to defy the values of the world, and put inner truth before outward convention, and so on? This pathos must be strongly resisted. Liberal Christianity must learn to adopt a sober matter-of-fact approach to the issue, and not imply that it is religiously important or interesting. Oestreicher shows some awareness of this, when he writes: "Whether Jesus was gay or straight in no way affects who he was and what he means for the world today. Spiritually it is immaterial." But this is not really true: if Jesus is agreed to be gay, then the cultic aura of gay Christianity is infinitely magnified.

The way forward is for liberal Christianity to find a bigger narrative. This means learning to communicate a wider vision of freedom, and human flourishing, rooted in its ritual life. Such a vision will put identity politics in its place.

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