Gay People And The Strange Love of Christians

Welcome friends!

Last time out I discussed the Sultan of Brunei’s recent attempt to pander to the increasingly conservative and extremist Islamic religious sentiments in that part of the world by instituting a law requiring gay people be stoned to death if caught expressing their sexuality, a barbarous and torturous form of execution representatives of the Sultan suggested anyway was integral to Sharia or Islamic religious law.  Whenever I report on the news of the day from the more Muslim parts of the world I’m always afraid people may get the wrong end of the stick and suspect I have a particular antipathy toward the Islamic religion, which I don’t believe is really the case at all.  Indeed, I consider Islam to be a fairly typical representation of the religious mindset, which I suppose must explain why I write from a humanist rather than religious perspective.  I’m sure I must have mentioned before the similarly barbarous and gory history of Christianity, which has arguably been relatively benign the past few decades but of course was formerly the wellspring of an appalling amount of murder, torture, warfare, hatred, and discord throughout the world.  Not sure I remembered to do that last time out but fortunately I got a little dose of Christian “love” upside the head the other day to remind me.  It got me thinking about the similarities and differences in how those two great Middle Eastern religions cope or fail to cope with the existence of sexual minorities, so maybe I can just do a quick follow up on that.  (I’d say three great Middle Eastern religions and address Judaism as well but honestly who really knows what they think about anything unless one is actually in the club?  I suppose that’s one of the things I like about them.  If you’re going for a walk in the ether at least do us all a favor and keep whatever you think you discovered there to yourself.)

To get back to the matter at hand, the article that caught my eye this week involved an Australian rugby player named Israel Folau, who apparently got into a bit of hot water recently by sharing his Christian religious views on gay people and others as follows: “Drunks, homosexuals, adulterers, liars, fornicators, thieves, atheists and idolators - Hell awaits you."  In case anyone took it the wrong way Mr. Folau clarified later, "I share it with love.”  In the same spirit of avoiding misunderstandings allow me to clarify I have no real interest in rugby, Australian or otherwise, or in Mr. Folau personally, and also that I understand Mr. Folau’s religious sentiments are not necessarily typical for Australia.  I’m interested in Mr. Folau’s sentiments only because they represent a handy example of a certain common interpretation of Christian theology as it applies to gay people that can certainly also be found here in the USA.  Well, actually I suppose I was a bit interested in the other characters that ended up in the same boat as gay people including notably drunks, atheists, and idolators.  Apparently according to Mr. Folau’s understanding there are many paths to hell including nature, illness, philosophy, and competing religions.  And by the way what exactly is an idolator anyway?  Christians are always waving around that horrifying image of an ancient crucifixion.  Does that count?  How about statues of saints?  Mary?  I don’t really care, just saying.  Who exactly is praying to an idol anyway?  Well, actually I suppose it wasn’t just the people who ended up in the boat but the ones who didn’t make the cut I found a bit noteworthy.  We’ve got the thieves but how about their close cousins the robbers?  Murderers?  You know, just trying to detect some pattern in what’s going on here.

Anyway, the main thing that caught my eye in Mr. Folau’s little flipping off of gay people is the way Christians of this sort express their hatred of gay people in contrast to how devout Muslims like the Sultan of Brunei for example express their hatred of gay people.  Mr. Folau uses a little rhetorical trick or gimmick one commonly encounters in popular Christianity in which he is ostensibly not telling you what he thinks about gay people himself; he’s just passing on the good word about what his supernatural lord thinks about them.  He’s a messenger or middleman of sorts.  He’s not saying he wants gay people to go to hell.  He’s not consigning gay people to hell himself.  Indeed, in warning gay people of their fiery fate Mr. Folau himself is ostensibly expressing his love of gay people not his hate.  It’s a nice story although of course I suppose everyone must know by now not all Christian sects endorse this particular point of view and if Mr. Folau disagreed with it or was troubled by it in any way he could very easily investigate and eventually espouse a different form of Christianity, so of course it’s quite clear the hatred under discussion is not emanating solely from some other worldly plane but is centered squarely at least partially in Mr. Folau’s own personality and perspective on the world.  In other words, one can’t help but recognize Christians like Mr. Folau as somewhat hypocritical when they discusses expressing their agreed upon hatred of gay people with love for gay people.  It’s a strange sort of love isn’t it?

This third party, faux innocent bystander motif one finds in certain strands of Christianity stands in interesting contrast to certain strands of contemporary Islam in which not only are devout Muslims such as the Sultan of Brunei encouraged to share their understanding of the good lord’s feelings toward gay people they’re expected to actually carry out the lord’s bile and hatred by serving as the instrument by which the lord consigns gay people to hell, in the case of the Sultan by stoning them to death.  It’s clearly a much more active hands on and potentially ethically troubling approach than just standing on the sidelines warning them the lord will consign them to hell when they die and contemplating the day with evident satisfaction.

On the other hand, maybe I’m splitting hairs.  Christians for a long time were very much in step with contemporary Muslims in terms of their perceived moral duty to kill, main, and torture people on behalf of the lord.  Interestingly they talked pretty much the same way they do now.  Yes, they burned people at the stake but only because they loved them and wanted to save their souls by helping them atone for their sins here on earth in the agreed upon way: by slowly burning them into a pile of smoking ash.  They didn’t hate anyone themselves.  No, no.  They were all about love, love, love even when carrying out their perceived duty to their supernatural master to kill, kill, kill gay people, atheists, and a great many others besides.  And indeed I’m not even sure the distinction between active agent and third party messenger is significant from a theological point of view because the omnipotent supernatural entity ostensibly consigning gay people to eternal torture in hell is typically meant within Christian theology to also be a paragon of love, at least the strange love of the Christians.  One supposes the Sultan might similarly imagine himself to be expressing love and peace even while dutifully bashing in the head of some random gay youngster with a rock.  By the same token, one supposes there may be sects within Islam taking an approach more similar to Mr. Folau’s version of Christianity and contenting themselves with visions of the lord allowing and indeed consigning gay people to be tortured for eternity in hell rather than feeling any particular duty to act as the good lord’s court executioner and torturer in this life.

What’s my point?  Well, I suppose it must be that Christianity and Islam don’t appear to be all that different to me at least as far as gay people are concerned.  They’re both typical of at least the Middle Eastern form of the religious mindset.  Tomorrow a form of Christianity more similar to traditional historical Christianity might arise that might involve torturing and murdering unbelievers and gay people and so on while a form of Islam more similar to modern mainstream Christianity could break out any time and indeed likely already has with people neglecting or disavowing their moral duty to murder and torture to instead bang on about peace and love all the while looking forward with satisfaction to the prospect of the various objects of their various hatreds and sexual hangups getting their just desserts in the afterlife.  We give Christians the benefit of the doubt in this country.  We assume if they harbor feelings of hatred toward other people, such as gay people for example, they can talk about it and carry it about in their hearts and minds and so on but allow the good lord to express it in more concrete form in the next life and in that way co-exist with non-Christians who don’t share their ancient hatreds.   We should give Muslims the same benefit of the doubt and expect they can also come up with similar expediencies and adjustments in their theology that would allow them to co-exist peacefully with non-Muslims.  They have no reason to bother with that sort of thing in foreign Muslim-dominated countries of course, so one would hardly expect to hear anything like that from the majority Muslim areas of the world, but in the very different context of countries like the USA they do.  We can never accept anti-social behavior but when it comes to people’s religious beliefs we should give people some room to come up with something that works and not simply always assume the worst.

References

Israel Folau: Australia end player's contract over anti-gay message. April 15, 2019.  BBC.  https://www.bbc.com/sport/rugby-union/47932231.