Welcome back to Part 10 of A History of Incompatibility. In this series, we explore the development of Christian beliefs around human sexuality, particularly as it relates to present church schisms over LGBTQ inclusion. If you are just now joining the story, I recommend going back and starting at Part 1.
Also, if you’re enjoying the series, I was recently interviewed by Ministry Matters about A History of Incompatibility. Jump over there and read the interview at this link!
In this week’s installment, we have caught up to the 1960’s and 1970’s.
By the 60’s, popular psychology (and the religious community) was split between the opposing views of Edmund Bergler and Alfred Kinsey. Bergler followed Sigmund Freud, and believed homosexuality to be the result of improper development or growth. For Bergler, there was no such thing as a “healthy” homosexual because all homosexuals have an unconscious, masochistic will to suffer, to be less than. He argued that gay men do not change because they do not want to change. In the world of the Christian Right, this became spiritualized into the belief that God makes all people heterosexual, and that it is spiritual immaturity or failure that prevents the gay or lesbian from maturing into the straight person God intended them to be. For some, efforts were made to spiritually transform homosexuals through prayer and “reparative” or conversion therapy. For others, the gays were hopelessly opposed to God and were to be cast out. Some Calvinists even argued that God intentionally made some people gay for the purpose of predestining them to hell.
Others followed the work of Alfred Kinsey, who came to believe in a spectrum of sexuality, and argued that homosexuality was just as normal and natural as any other sexual expression. There were also clergy who initially tried to “pray the gay away,” who came to see gays and lesbians as healthy, normal people who did not need to be cured of their attractions. Gay ministries were started, not to make people straight, but to proclaim the power and salvation of Jesus for all people, and to work alongside the LGBT community in their lived experiences.
We’ll get there next week, but I bet you can guess which of these two approaches has been more successful in producing fruitful and whole lives for individuals, and which has resulted in countless homeless youth and suicides.
In June 1969, the gay, lesbian and trans community came out of the shadows of society with the Stonewall Uprising, which inspired annual Pride parades across the world. The Stonewall Inn in Greenwich Village, NYC was owned by the mafia, who cut costs left and right because there really weren’t many places where the LGBT community could safely gather. Stonewall Inn was one of the few gay bars that also welcomed drag queens and allowed dancing. It became a haven for homeless gay youth. Police often raided places like this, though usually corrupt cops would tip off the mafia so the store’s employees wouldn’t get arrested. The cops would take anyone suspected of cross-dressing to the bathroom to pull down their pants or take off their dress and find out their gender. The police raided Stonewall Inn on June 28, 1969 and arrested 13 people. Onlookers gathered outside the bar. An officer was forcing a lesbian into the police car and hit her over the head when she pleaded to the crowd to do something. And the crowd fought back. The officers barricaded themselves in Stonewall Inn, but someone set the building on fire. The fire department rescued them and put out the fire, but the riots continued for five more days, with thousands filling the streets to protest.
The events at Stonewall Inn brought the gay, lesbian and transgender community out of the shadows and into the spotlight. Pride marches began meeting annually to commemorate the Stonewall Uprising. “Gay Pride” became the chosen slogan because “Gay Power” did not make sense to the community that felt like they had no power, and all they could hold onto was their self-worth and dignity as a unique human being. The gay community was split over its goals: be as “normal” as possible and prove we fit into society? Or be as “queer” as possible and prove that society as a whole is broken?
Soon after, by 1971, the American Psychological Association (APA) voted to remove homosexuality from the mental illness category. Society was still a long way from accepting homosexuality, but it was going to have to come to terms with the realization that there were far more homosexuals in the population than anyone had imagined, and they were here to stay.
The Rise of the Religious Right
Our present schisms over LGBT inclusion in the church, and indeed schisms in the political landscape of the U.S., owe a great deal to the rise of the Religious Right as a voting demographic in the late 70’s, early 80’s. In Part 9, we addressed the introduction of segregationist academies, Christian private schools for whites only in response to the Supreme Court’s decision that public school segregation was illegal. Prominent figures like Paul Weyrich and Jerry Falwell were able to unite far right evangelical Christians around the idea that it was their “religious freedom” to separate black and white people. Weyrich, often viewed as a founding father of the New Right, famously said, “I don’t want everybody to vote…our leverage in the elections quite candidly goes up as the voting populace goes down.”
As the 1970s moved forward, Falwell and Weyrich weren’t able to get a large enough voting block around the idea of segregating schools, so they pivoted to two other issues that they believed could get the voter turn-out they wanted. It had been five years since Roe v. Wade had passed, removing restrictions on abortion access. At first, evangelical Protestants largely ignored its passing or were even someone supportive of it, believing that life began at birth. But Falwell and Weyrich were able to gather other fundamentalist evangelicals around the fears that secular humanism was a threat to Christian families, and that the key issues of the day were the growing acceptance of abortion and homosexuality. With the help of theologian Francis Schaeffer, they were able to convince enough people that life started at conception, and that abortion is murder. They used slippery slope rhetoric to raise fears that if society accepted abortion and homosexuality, what worse things would they accept next?
Falwell called his new movement the Moral Majority, tied it directly to the Republican Party, and much of evangelical Christianity became beholden to his fundamentalism. Though the New Evangelical movement began in the 1940’s to make Christian fundamentalism less extreme, by the 1970’s and 80’s, the term “evangelical Christian” began to mark a demographic who was intolerant of others who did not share their beliefs, and marked abortion and homosexuality (and eventually, whether you are Republican or not) as the true standards for whether one is a real Christian or not.
This is unfortunate because there still remain many evangelical Christians who continue to uphold the authority of Scripture, the importance of the cross, and a desire for all to know Christ, but who are also tolerant of other beliefs, and even affirming of LGBT inclusion (and even, gasp, vote Democrat!). No community is a monolith, and that includes the evangelical community.
I conclude this week’s story with a panel of singer and religious anti-gay activist Anita Bryant. If anything, she gave language that Jerry Falwell would pick up and make a regular rhetoric for hate speech in the name of religious freedom.
Thank you for joining us on this week’s journey through A History of Incompatibility. Click here for Part 11.
If you want to learn more, check out any of these fine resources.
The Journal of the 1972 General Conference of The UMC. (Start on page 456).
Don Hand: Homosexuality and the 1972 Social Principles (Written by Hand himself, 2014).
The Saddest Day: Gene Leggett and the Origins of the Incompatibility Clause (2017).
Chaos, Sexuality & Politics in the UMC (2019).
Entangled: A History of American Methodism, Politics, and Sexuality (Dreff, 2018).
Heavy Burdens: 7 Ways LGBTQ Christians Experience Harm in the Church (Rivera, 2021).
Stonewall Riots (History.com).
The Real Origins of the Religious Right (Politico, 2014).