So the broad scholarly consensus in the fields of history, anthropology, religious studies, etc, is that much of the globalized anti-LGBT sentiment we see today was imported, particularly through Christian colonialism and the spread of Abrahamic religious frameworks.
Most other religious frameworks did not originally carry this level of anti-LGBT sentiment. There is no doctrinal reason among them, it is primarily cultural influence stemming from colonialism.
I’m curious among the affirming crowd here, how do you all rationalize or conceptualize the role of Christianity here? Is it not concerning for you guys the role this religion has had in the oppression of large swaths of the population?
There are a number of books and papers that go deep into this topic:
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Kapya Kaoma - Christianity, Globalization, and Protective Homophobia: Democratic Contestation of Sexuality in Sub-Saharan Africa
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Robert Aldrich - Colonialism and Homosexuality
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Louis-Georges Tin - The Dictionary of Homophobia: A Global History of Gay & Lesbian Experience
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Phillip M. Ayoub - The Global Fight Against LGBTI Rights: How Transnational Conservative Networks Target Sexual and Gender Minorities
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It’s hard
But it comes down to this for me. Others have done bad with this and I disagree with these others. When I was in Sunday school they teach us to love thy neighbor not steal, not hate, not kill. Then I see places like westboro baptist church a literal hate group. I denounce their teaching and beliefs. I stand by loving and caring for all no matter what. I know what I and any one else here will never be enough to make up for the horrible things these groups have done but I hope we can help and undo some of the hate that comes from these people who have twisted the good book.
A lot of the writers of biblical books added their personal slants. And in the excluded books, a lot of those slants are rebuked. I’m very much enjoying exploring the 88 books, and have recently found the lost books of Adam and Eve and just started listening to them. Having gone to
sightssites like My Jewish Learning, the Jewish encyclopedia and other sites, I’m discovering mistranslations, as well. But aside from all that, Mathew 7 is very clear.Tradition grows, moves, and changes. It is also multifarious, complex, and the growing, moving, and changing site of ongoing arguments. That “Christianity”—a broad simplification of an immense tradition—includes bad things as well as good should not be surprising.
The real problem is that people imagine tradition as something that is only imposed upon them, as though they were merely inert receptacles, instead of something in which they participate with their own moral agency. Our tradition is like the village square of our culture: it is the place where we argue about what to do, not the instructions for how to do it.
We should own the numerous failures of our tradition, but we are fools if we imagine that we can immunize ourselves from future failures by simply rejecting or cutting off that tradition. It is there not just as a storehouse of inspiration, but as a storehouse of error. This is why, at the root of our tradition, in our scriptures, we keep both the proclamation of law from Sinai and the immediate turn to idolatry with the Golden Calf; and it is why we keep both the priestly instructions and stories of the institution of kingship and the extensive and rigorous critique of the priestly and monarchical power in the prophets. The trajectory is set right there: we are a people who have failed at least as often as we have succeeded.
We should continually critique our own past even as we remain engaged in the tradition that continues to grow from that past. That is not rationalization; it is reality. We should not succumb to the quintessentially modernist fallacy that we can somehow amputate our own history and pretend that our own character and morality has somehow sprung from some other ground.
