Radical Love. Patrick S. Cheng
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negative relationship between Christianity and homosexuality was Derrick Sherwin Bailey’s Homosexuality and the Western Christian Tradition, published in 1955 in the United Kingdom. Bailey, an Anglican priest, wrote the book because he wanted to “state as accurately and to examine as fully as possible” biblical and church attitudes toward homosexuality from the early church to the Middle Ages. Bailey concluded that the Western Christian tradition about homosexuality was both “erroneous” and “defective” because it had disregarded what Bailey called the “biological, psychological, or genetical” condition of “inversion,” which was a term used to describe people who had a gay sexual orientation. That is, Bailey argued that the condition of inversion is an “inherent” and “apparently unalterable” condition that is itself “morally neutral.” Because the invert is “impelled by his condition” to engage in same-sex acts, these acts should no longer be viewed as “acts of perversion.” As such, Bailey believed that the Western Christian tradition “can no longer be regarded as an adequate guide by the theologian, the legislator, the sociologist, and the magistrate.”1
Although it may seem surprising that a work such as Bailey’s was published as early as 1955, there have been lesbian and gay church communities in existence since the 1940s. For example, the LGBT church historian Heather White has documented the founding of the Eucharistic Catholic Church in 1946 in Atlanta by a group of Catholics who had been denied the Eucharist because they had self-identified as homosexual. The group was led by a former Catholic seminarian who had been dismissed from seminary for having sex with another man. The group advertised as early in 1954 in ONE Magazine, a publication of the nascent “homophile” movement.2
In 1960, the openly gay Congregationalist minister Robert W. Wood published Christ and the Homosexual (Some Observations), which was a groundbreaking work of gay theology. Wood suggested that the church should be true to its “message of love” by initiating “positive acts of concern” for the homosexual. Some of these positive acts would include encouraging the “homosexual” to “participate in Church activities.” Wood also urged the church to “rethink[] the theological position on homosexuality” and the conditions under which same-sex acts might be moral. Wood concludes that homosexuality can in fact be moral if it “permits full expression” of one’s personality and allows oneself to bring forth all of one’s “redemptive love, mature adjustment and creativeness.”3
Following the publication of Wood’s book, a number of significant events occurred in the 1960s with respect to LGBT people and Christianity. In June 1964, the Council on Religion and the Homosexual (CRH) was established in San Francisco. The CRH was formed by a coalition of Protestant ministers and leaders from the gay community, and it recognized the need for dialogue between gay activists and communities of faith. In 1966, the national board of the YMCA published a book by H. Kimball Jones called Toward a Christian Understanding of the Homosexual, which challenged the “prejudices which have marred the vision of Christians through the ages” by presenting an “unbiased understanding” of homosexuality.4 In 1967, the prominent Anglican process theologian Norman Pittenger published a 64-page booklet through the SCM Press called Time for Consent?: A Christian’s Approach to Homosexuality— expanded to a book with the same title nearly a decade later— in which he presented a sustained argument as to why the church should “alter its attitude to homosexuals.”5
In October 1968, the Reverend Troy Perry, a Pentecostal minister who had been expelled from his denomination for being gay, founded the Universal Fellowship of Metropolitan Community Churches (MCC) with twelve other people in his living room in Southern California. A few weeks before, Perry had placed an ad in The Advocate, a gay magazine. MCC has since grown into a worldwide denomination ministering to LGBT people and their allies in over thirty countries around the world. Perry later wrote about his journey as both a minister and a gay man in his 1972 autobiography, The Lord Is My Shepherd and He Knows I’m Gay.6
In the 1970s, a number of key works of apologetic theology were published. In 1976, John J. McNeill, a Jesuit priest, published The Church and the Homosexual, which had the stated purpose of reassessing the “traditional moral theology on the question of homosexuality within the Roman Catholic community.”7 McNeill had published a number of articles on homosexuality and Catholicism going back as far as 1970, but this book led to his silencing by the Vatican and his ultimate dismissal from the Jesuits.
In 1978, Letha Dawson Scanzoni and Virginia Ramey Mollenkott published Is the Homosexual My Neighbor?: A Positive Christian Response. Scanzoni and Mollenkott discussed the historical, biblical, scientific, and ethical bases for accepting gays and lesbians in the church, and they challenged Christians to accept homosexuals as their neighbors, just as Jesus had accepted the Samaritans, who also were outcasts in their day.8
Apologetic theology reached its height with the publication in 1980 of John Boswell’s Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality. In that book, Boswell argued that the early church was not as uniformly homophobic as the tradition would have us believe. According to Boswell, it was not until the thirteenth century that the Christian church started to treat same-sex acts with hostility and intolerance.9 Although Boswell was an academic historian, his work had an apologetic dimension in that he wanted the church to accept gay people for who they are, and, conversely, for gay people to recognize that they can be both Christian and gay.
Liberation Theology
The second strand in the evolution of queer theology is liberation theology. This strand is modeled after the various liberation theologies that came into being in the late 1960s (for example, Latin American liberation theology and black liberation theology), which were based upon the Exodus narrative of the Israelites being freed from their slavery in Egypt. The primary concern of this strand was not just acceptance of queer people by the church, but also the demonstration of how queer liberation—that is, freedom from heterosexism and homophobia, as well as the freedom to be one’s own authentic self—is at the very heart of the gospel message and Christian theology.
Like the liberation theologies of Gustavo Gutiérrez and James Cone,10 the liberation strand of queer theology argued that God was not neutral and in fact had a preferential option for the poor and oppressed. For example, in 1968, the Anglican priest H.W. Montefiore published a controversial essay, “Jesus, the Revelation of God,” which suggested that Jesus’ celibacy might have been due to his being a homosexual. If so, Montefiore argued, this would be “evidence of God’s self-identification with those who are unacceptable to the upholders of ‘The Establishment’ and social conventions.” That is, just as liberation theologians had argued in other contexts, Montefiore argued that God’s nature was “befriending the friendless” and “identifying himself [sic] with the underprivileged.”11
This focus on liberation theology appeared in other publications as well. For example, the September 1972 issue of The Gay Christian, a newsletter of the Metropolitan Community Church of New York, featured a number of articles about “gay theology.” Howard Wells, the pastor of MCC New York at the time, wrote a provocative piece called “Gay God, Gay Theology” in which he described how the gay community has the right to refer to God—whom he called “our liberator, our redeemer”—as our “gay God.” Wells rejected the notion of a God who would oppress gay people. Specifically, Wells said that any God who does so and “is blind to the enslavement of gay people” is nothing more than an “oppressive idol.”12
In 1974, Sally Gearhart and William R. Johnson edited an anthology called Loving Women/Loving Men: Gay Liberation and the Church. In that volume, Johnson wrote an essay called “The Good News of Gay Liberation,” in which he argued for the liberation of lesbians and gay men in the church. He noted that the “passive acceptance of injustice is no longer possible” for lesbian and gay people, and that the cry of “No more!” is especially applicable to the Christian church. Johnson proposed a number of goals for the church toward liberation, including the affirmation of same-sex relationships, electing gay people into church leadership positions, encouraging gay people to enroll in seminaries, and developing a “totally