Welcome back to the central conceit of this blog: walking you through my two week-long sessions at a nondenominational conservative evangelical summer camp.
To catch you up to speed: this camp markets itself as a place for high-school-aged kids to strengthen their worldview prior to entering college. I have no idea how much it cost (or costs – it’s still around) but I understood my admission there to be a special privilege – a chance to be taught & equipped with the best tools available.
Each year I was given a solidly inch-thick three-ring binder with speaker notes and resources on all sorts of key topics (for a full list, check out the end of my first post here). At one point a few years ago, my therapist semi-humorously(???) suggested that I burn them. I decided to keep them and write about them, so … here we are.
My time at this camp felt important; felt truly meaningful. As an oldest child, I found a lot of identity and meaning in responsibility. I wanted to be given access to the Real Information – cut the crap, don’t pander to me, tell me how it is, straight up.
I attended the camp hoping for the unvarnished truth: about the world, about society, about what Christians are up against. I felt privileged to get it in such a direct fashion, and was excited to return for a second year.
I was in eighth grade / I said he was a queer
I thought he had it coming / He died of AIDS that year
My liberty / Like Christ's death meant nothing to me
When the world was black and white
Watch me turn my back tonight
On Freddie Mercury
Mr. Fahrenheit
– (Christian ska legends) Five Iron Frenzy, Fahrenheit, 2000
A Note About This Series
As I reviewed my notebooks, I noticed that the camp’s approach to defining acceptable sexual behavior & gender roles roughly broke down into three vectors:
Fear (focusing on the personal & societal consequences of sinful sexual behavior)
Guilt (focusing on one’s internal struggle with lust & personal purity)
Shame (focusing on the expectations of one’s role in a proper evangelical definition of marriage)
After reviewing this post with my editor (insert Borat voice), we both felt it appropriate to provide a couple of up-front qualifiers:
First, a content warning. I reproduce some entries from my notebooks here that I believe are plainly intended to use fear to scare a bunch of kids away from undesirable behavior – and also my own notes from those sessions. I don’t focus on refuting individual statistics from those excerpts because I don’t think the accuracy of those statistics is material to the evangelical view of these issues.
Second, while this overall series is focused on sex & gender writ large, a lot of this particular post ended up being about the queer experience of sexuality in particular. This wasn’t intentional on my part, but a result of evangelicalism tending to lean heavily on fear when combating LGBTQ issues and identities.
On Phobias
I’ve debated for years how to break this topic down – how to talk around or gently allude to the passages from my notebooks and the lectures I attended. I’ve decided to just reproduce them here for you to read.
Some of the content I’ll cover here is more nuanced or religious or political, but not this moment. The above paragraph haunted me for years, and it feels pretty strange to post it to you now – but I think it’s the most pointed example in all of my notes of this tactic of fear in action. It’s so … grotesque to read.
No, I’m not going to spend space in this post arguing against this excerpt, because as I said earlier, the excerpt’s context or accuracy is not material to the evangelical perspective. This is just information that was simply designed to scare us.
I can’t emphasize this enough: the term “homophobia”, followed a few years later in the public consciousness by “transphobia”, is not concretely meaningful to an evangelical; it’s not an insult. If anything, it’s an insulting minimization; a way to take something truly threatening and attempt to shame one’s awareness of its harm.
The term doesn’t really even describe the evangelical perspective appropriately. “Phobias” are by and large psychological – someone with germaphobia fears germs more than the typical amount; someone with arachnophobia fears spiders more than the typical amount.
“Homophobia” is not a meaningful criticism to an evangelical because they believe they fear the implications & consequences of homosexuality the appropriate amount. That fear is based on something very deep and real.
Even if the images in this post partially or fully match the perspectives of a reader of this blog, I doubt they would contest my explanation of why “-phobia” terms don’t resonate with evangelicals.
Why would an one flinch at being called “homophobic” when they truly believe in the physical & spiritual danger outlined here?
On Isolation
My friend is a music teacher; last year she applied to teach at a K-12 school (or something in that range). She said the interview had gone well and she was well on her way to landing the job, but then the interviewer slid a form across the table.
My understanding is it’s pretty typical for Christian schools to require a statement of belief. My additional understanding is that at least one of the colleges I attended require that all faculty sign a statement that included saying that they were Young-Earth Creationist. In my friend’s case, this statement included an agreement that she believed in the evangelical concepts of sex, gender and marriage.
My friend doesn’t believe it’s wrong to be gay or trans. She told the interviewer she couldn’t sign the document. Then, as she recounted to me, the interviewer said something in the vein of:
“It’s okay – I get it. Look, just sign the document.”
I don’t think evangelicals all agree that gay people are Satan’s tool for the downfall of society. I don’t think they all agree that it’s wrong for someone with a penis to wear a dress. I definitely don’t think they all agree as to how many Evangelical beliefs need to be legislated. (I, for one, loved to say “you can’t legislate morality” in college, which is a very college student thing to say. (Look, I had just read Atlas Shrugged; I was going through some stuff.))
But my friend’s interviewer’s response really stuck with me. Their response revealed that the school’s form isn’t actually intended to force the faculty to all have the same beliefs. It’s just intended to create a consensus. And the purpose of that consensus is, flatly, to avoid having to deal with gay or trans kids.
The only gay people I knew as a kid were celebrities that my parents or Christian magazines told me about. I knew about Anne Heche, Ellen, Elton John, and Rock Hudson. I didn’t know who Freddie Mercury was when I first listened to the Five Iron Frenzy track I linked at top of this post; I was 16.
I don’t remember speaking to someone I knew was gay1 until I was an adult2 and I didn’t (knowingly) meet a trans person until I was in my 30’s.
I think just meeting a gay or trans person – looking them in the eye, knowing them as a person, and caring what they have to say – is a massively impactful force in religious deconstruction. In ways both large and small, the evangelical view of LGBTQ people and its roots in fear are reinforced through ensuring that there are no gay or trans people around to be heard & considered.
The First Rung is Fear
This, then, is the first rung – the fundamental problem statement that informs how all manner of non-affirming evangelicals, from fundamentalists to casual churchgoers, engage with the topic of LGBTQ people.
(I’m leaning on my ladder parlance here because I started working on that system specifically for this topic & this reason.)
I think a decent rung 1 problem statement is something like:
“It is, at minimum, an individual sin and at maximum an existential threat to society for a person to defy the Biblically defined rules regarding sexual behavior & gender roles.”
Or, shorter:
“It is sinful to be gay3 or trans4.”
Every non-affirming evangelical view starts from this foundation, and just varies in terms of what is built upon it.
It’s this foundation that allows my binder to contain the above paragraph not in an effort to build compassion for how LGBTQ people are a threatened & marginalized population, but to reinforce the idea that being gay is fundamentally wrong, sinful, risky … dangerous.
It’s this foundation that remains unshaken whether or not one believes that anal sex is safe or unsafe. All of those statistics and studies are just built on top of that foundation; if they were all proven wrong, the foundation would still stand.
Some more fundamentalist or outspoken individuals may openly express viewpoints exactly in line with the excerpts I’ve posted here; many more will keep quiet or take issue with individual statistics or issues of framing & tone while holding to the same fundamental beliefs.
Some may forbid LGBTQ people from entering a church, others will welcome them in. Some may support legislation to eliminate trans people as a recognized category; others may practice a more laissez-faire politics and keep their beliefs personal.
But the rung doesn’t change.
Looking ahead
Phew, okay. I think I’m going to end up writing a series on sex and gender; I’ve somewhat planned ahead. I’ll talk about guilt next; I’m already working on that one.
I’m also going to start writing about Christian music to help this blog from being too dire tonally. Please email me with band suggestions; if you’ve read this far, you sure deserve consideration in that regard.
Also. Remember that Five Iron Frenzy lyric? I suspect that album was the only CD in the Christian bookstore to acknowledge AIDS, and “Fahrenheit” seems supportive of gay people – but later in the song, lyricist Reese Roper reveals his regret is simply that he hadn’t separated the sin from the sinner:
Predisposed to bigotry
The regular run-of-the-mill American story
The stench of greasepaint on our faces
Pass the mask to our next of kin
Instead of wiser idioms
Like "love the sinner, hate the sin"
Five Iron broke up a few years later, laid dormant for a while, ran a wildly successful Kickstarter, and got back together for a couple of new albums, having reconsidered their beliefs in the process.
The last song off their most recent album, Huerfano (“Orphan”), appears to revisit that theme, but without the separation of the sinner and the sin.
When I heard this track for the first time, I cried.
They punched you stomach just to feed their egos
Called you "faggot" just to drown your sunlight
One time I held my voice they told me never sing
They only pin the angels to the earth to break their wings
Now fly you orphans
Here you belong
Welcome you wayward souls
Now lift your song
Thanks for reading this post.
When I was somewhere around 12-14, my family met extended relatives at a restaurant in another town that had a rainbow flag in the window and seemed to be in the “gay area” of town. I was, frankly, terrified and on high alert the whole time. I suspected everyone in the restaurant of being gay. I ordered a grilled chicken sandwich, and it was delicious, covered in melted cheese. Afterward, I told an extended relative about this incident, and they told me “you know, they spit in your food to try and give you AIDS”. This story is a footnote because, frankly, it sucks and haunts me.
A bunch of people I knew at the time turned out to be gay, of course, including (at least) two people in my small homeschool friend group and, most humorously, my group leader from the summer camp this blog centers upon.
There’s a Christian author named Rebecca McLaughlin who identifies herself as “same-sex attracted” but lives in a heterosexual Christian marriage. She’s written a book and so forth reinforcing the idea that being gay is a valid identity, but it doesn’t change the Biblical guidance of what constitutes sin w/r/t sexuality. This has provided a way for some evangelicals to instead say “being gay is real, but being gay and acting on it is wrong”. I don’t think the “acting on it” qualifier is meaningfully different than “being gay is wrong”; it’s just a second-rung solution to that problem of “being gay is wrong” – something like “but the solution is that you are able to bear the weight of the burden that God has put on your shoulders”. I believe this is a modern-day rebranding of conversion therapy and am not going to dignify it with more than a footnote.
To build on the previous footnote, I think drawing the line at “acting on it” is also generally the evangelical approach to transness. Depending on who you talk to, they may be okay with one’s wardrobe or presentation changing, but changing pronouns or modifying one’s body (hormones, surgery, etc) is generally “acting on it” territory. The concept of being transgender was never brought up at my summer camp, although according to my research the current iteration of the camp certainly addresses it head-on.