THE END OF THE VICTOR’S PARADE
I sometimes think God has put us apostles on display, like prisoners of war at the end of a victor’s parade, condemned to die. We have become a spectacle to the entire world—to people and angels alike.
—1 Corinthians 4:9, NLT
“Toward the end of my sophomore year,” writes Brigid, a poet and transwoman, “I was invited, along with fewer than a dozen other sensitive, bookish students the Franciscans were encouraging to consider religious vocations, to attend a working retreat at a seminary eight hours away in Massachusetts. It seemed like it would be fun, a week-long road trip with some of my close friends. While there, we would help the seminary set up, staff, and pack up its annual lawn fête, which was an important fundraiser. We also received tours of the facilities and lectures about student life at seminary and religious life more generally. We were given the opportunity to confess and receive the sacrament of reconciliation with faculty members.”
Having spent her first seventeen years as straight and cisgender-presenting, living with the knowledge that to reveal her gender dysphoria would mean ostracization, Brigid was relieved to have someone other than her family, peers, and school staff to open her soul to.
“I saw this as an opportunity to unburden my conscience of perceived sins around my gender and sexuality with clergy I'd never have to see again,” she says, “so I was tearfully open with my confessor, and I visited him in the confessional several times throughout the week.
“On the last full day of the week, the same priest who'd been hearing my confessions orchestrated time alone with me in his office and sexually assaulted me. It was not violent, but neither was it consensual. He was casual about it. He acknowledged us both as sinners and absolved us on the spot. He told me that he hoped I'd answer my calling and return in a few years to the seminary as a student.
“I left in shock and shame. I told no one of this for more than twenty years, and living with that shame and silence caused me to (a) fear clergy, (b) disdain the frequent hypocrisy of the entire Christian enterprise, and (c) even more ruthlessly self-censor my authentic gender identity.”
When I originally pitched this story, I described it thus:
At the end of every Mr. Peabody and Sherman cartoon, a little mustachioed janitor follows behind the Parade of History, quietly sweeping up the mess in its wake.
With the eyes of the whole world on the rise of Christian Fascism and White Nationalism in the US, the church needs to be doing likewise—cleaning up the mess it has left strewn all over the lives of people whom it has harmed. If the church is going to stand up to and defeat the perversion that is Christian Fascism, it must first listen to those whom it has othered, marginalized, and hurt during its centuries-long “victor’s parade.” Where possible, it must do what it can to make right those wrong… We as Christians must be prepared to listen to the grievances of those whom we have alienated, and act upon them in humility before the world—even at the cost of our social standing and privilege.
The more I learn, however, of the sheer magnitude of the wreckage, the more I regard this image as woefully inadequate. Far from sweeping up ticker tape and confetti, we as church must be prepared to disarm landmines and remove deeply embedded shrapnel. Because people who hate the church already regard all our good works as performative, and our sweeping up as a way to hide the damage, thereby absolving ourselves on the spot.
“Cheap grace,” said Dietrich Bonhoeffer, “is the grace we bestow upon ourselves.”[1] If we are to heal our rift with sexual minorities and others whom the Church has harmed, the grace we need will be, to use Bonhoeffer’s word, “costly.”
One challenge as we move forward is going to be not invoking the fable of the blind men and the elephant to suggest that the wounded are only seeing part of the big picture. To say “not all Christians” and “but my church” would likely be heard as dismissive of Othered people’s experience. Moreover, since many LGBTQ folk dismiss all church-based good works as performative gestures meant to distract from an irredeemably hateful Christian agenda,[2] nothing we say in our own defense as church will help. We cannot expect traumatized people to make distinctions between Christian communities.
Besides, the fable of the blind men and the elephant can also be applied to the churches. After spending a lot of time in my own racially diverse, socially active, educated Episcopalian parish, with openly LGBTQ clergy, staff, and lay leaders, it would be easy to regard our situation as normative. If we regard Christian Fascism as a “them problem,” we will be unable to take responsibility for the harm caused by other Christians.
Having spent a decade teaching at an evangelical university, I have seen first-hand the scars left on my students by their upbringing, especially where sexuality is concerned. Many young adults who grew up during the “purity movement” of the 1990s found themselves unprepared for adult sexuality.
“What's really interesting is I had this discussion with, I think, almost every one of my Christian friends, or at least who grew up Christian,” says Patty, a mother in her forties, “and not one has had an easy transition into being able to just be sexual. To this day they all still struggle with that with their partners.”
In much evangelical purity culture, sexual fulfillment has come to replace procreation—historically emphasized by the Roman church as the raison d’être of marriage. Sexual fulfillment replaced procreation as the raison d’etre of marriage, with attractive young leaders at youth retreats who “bragged about their hot wives and great sex lives.”[3] Commit to abstinence until (straight) marriage, the message ran, and all this will be yours.
The result is a worldview, evolved over the past five hundred years, that promises heterosexual Christians everything they could possibly desire out of sex, as long as it takes place within the context of heterosexual marriage. Marriage can be defined apart from the sacraments. It can be defined apart from procreation…but it can’t be defined apart from the sexual needs of everyday Christians who happen to be straight.[4]
But the emphasis on “purity” not only haunted evangelical youth with its carrot/stick approach before marriage, it also snatched away the promised prize from many after marriage.
“It had effects on my marriage big-time,” says Patty, “because I went into a marriage having all of these problems with my body and my sexuality, and then I was supposed to suddenly be sexual! Oh my God, how you even function like that? It was so damaging. And it’s stuff I am genuinely still sorting through with my husband.”
Lacie, a published writer with twenty years experience writing romance novels, thrillers, and essays, is separated from her husband, though they continue to be close friends and to co-parent their two children. As a cis-gendered queer woman, her struggle with the Catholic Church has been different from Brigid’s.
“My father was raised in a devout Roman Catholic family; my mother converted before their marriage. I was baptized as a toddler rather than an infant, and went to Catholic school from kindergarten through high school. While I still find some comfort in the rituals of Mass— the cleansing with Holy water, the scent of Frankincense, the taste of the Communion wafer— I always struggled to believe.”
As even a cursory perusal of any online comments sections shows, conservatives often complain about the LGBTQ community’s push for visibility and representation. (The grievance is generally expressed as LGBTQ people being “in your face” about their identities, and “shoving their lifestyle down our throats.”) This urge to silence and disappear LGBTQ Americans is one of the hottest-burning engines of hatred within Christian Fascism.
Of course, a primary reason for raising LGBTQ visibility is to help young people, often stewing in feelings they have been taught to find abhorrent, know that they are not alone.
“I didn’t fully realize I was bisexual until my early thirties” says Lacie, now forty-three. “Attending Catholic school in the eighties and nineties, it wasn’t something that was discussed, and it’s hard to understand something when there is no frame of reference for it.”
Unlike Brigid, Lacie’s sexuality didn’t bring her into conflict at church.
“I don’t hide my sexuality, but neither do I feel the need for a formal ‘coming out.’ I’ve never felt marginalized by my sexuality, but that is likely due to two reasons: 1, I did not understand my sexuality while I was a practicing Catholic, and 2, I am straight-presenting.”
Not everyone is so lucky.
“Last year I dated a former schoolmate--a man who identifies as bisexual and still practices--and I know his experience was different; he feels a lot of shame, and is out to very few people.”
Brigid also experienced the shame and fear that so often accompany isolation.
In high school, she says, “I sat through lectures explaining God's plan for human procreation and how deviation from that plan is disordered and innately sinful. I learned that folks with homosexual inclinations should not be rejected by Christians but should be encouraged to adopt a celibate lifestyle and carry their sexual deviance as a cross, never indulging it but instead resisting through the power of community and prayer.
“And that was my approach. I tried to tame my desire to live my life as a woman, to be seen by the world as a woman, by resisting the urge to experiment with wearing women's clothing, and I tried to resist also my romantic attraction to one of my male classmates. I prayed each night to God to make me ‘normal’ instead of wistfully praying, as I had when I was younger, for a do-over, an opportunity to be born again into a body that just matched my gender conviction. But it was no use, and I learned to hate myself for failing to live up to God's standards.”
Not content to equate God’s standards with those of the institutional Church, the Archdeacon of the (Episcopal) diocese of Philly recently gave a sermon for the new cohort of deacons, in which he exhorted them to "go be a pebble in the shoe of the church." I asked Brigid and Lacie what that would look like for them.
“I think I would like to address the Bible being taken so literally,” Lacie says. “The Bible we know today was written by human men and therefore carried so much implicit bias. Jesus was a person of color and one of his closest friends was a sex worker. The stories are not just those of suffering, but a guidebook for racism, misogyny, and more. If this often hateful book is supposed to be from an all-powerful god, it seems to me that he’s not a god worth worshipping. However, if we use it as a tool for further thought or a metaphor, it becomes much more useful, and much kinder to the humanity it is supposed to guide.”[5]
Brigid is less sanguine.
“I no longer have any direct connection to Christianity or any organized religion. By the end of my first year of college, I'd dropped any pretense of religious practice.
“However, there’s no one in the United States who doesn't live under the shadow of Christianity, and I'm no exception. It is the ascendent Christian-nationalist form of the faith that most impacts me now, since it is this iteration of Christianity that has infiltrated our legislatures and courthouses, directly attacking on every front my right to exist publicly as a transgender woman.
“The Church showed me as a young person that it would not welcome me or others like me, so I walked away from it. But it haunted me for another two decades in the form of the self-censorship it taught me, which stood between me and the authentic life I needed; and in the form of Christian nationalism, it has actively stalked me in the years since I came out of the closet, trying to steal my joy and shove me back into the dark, lonely little closet that was my life for its first thirty eight years.”
When I mention the two factors that interfere most with my own attempts to confront conservative Christians on their arguably un-Christlike behavior—1. They won’t listen to me, and 2. Churches like mine are too busy trying to do the things they won’t—Brigid is blunt.
“I would say that folks can, or should, be able to walk and chew gum at the same time. Christian nationalism is a profound threat to all Americans, and once Christian nationalists have fully subverted secular government, they'll likely make it unlawful for those who consider themselves ‘true’ Christians to minister to many of the most vulnerable Americans, including and especially queer folks and undocumented immigrants. I don't think Christians should compartmentalize their compassion, avoid politics, focus only on their ministry of choice at the expense of the bigger picture--which is that the name of their faith is dragged through the mud every day by a growing Christian-nationalist movement that is brutally using Christianity as a vehicle for evil. If you're Christian and you believe that evil exists and should be combatted by the faithful, by avoiding politics and narrowing your ministry to a needlepoint to avoid politicization and potential conflict with other Christians, you're ignoring the beam in your own eye.”
Again, I want so badly to point out that churches that take in Syrian refugees, escort women safely into abortion clinics, picket gun dealers, and lobby the state legislature for full, fair funding for public schools can scarcely be accused of wishing to avoid politics—but I know this is not the time; indeed, as long as sexual abuse and the betrayal of the young exists in the churches, it may never be the right time for self-justification.
How, then, can inclusivity-minded Christians move forward, with so much gender and sexual baggage weighing us down? Is there any hope for the future?
“My entire experience of Christianity can be summed up by the words and phrases contradiction, confusion, shame, guilt, fear, repression, denial, learned self-censorship, performativity, and hypocrisy,” says Brigid. “I met many good Christians who did good things, but by the end of my Christian experience I couldn't help but think that those good Christians were good in spite of their church and scripture rather than because of them.”
Hatred, wrote C.S. Lewis, “is often the compensation by which a frightened man reimburses himself for the miseries of Fear. The more he fears, the more he will hate."[6] Sexual minorities often live in fear—fear of exposure, rejection, and exclusion on a personal level, and, under Christo-fascism, fear of erasure by a hostile government. If the churches are to make common cause with them against authoritarianism, we must look beyond hostility and distrust to the underlying pain and fear.
Lacie, whose experiences have made her skeptical rather than fearful, offers a note of hope.
“My own children attend Catholic school,” she says, because I believe that thinking about spirituality is important, no matter where you land on it.”
[1] Dietrich Bonhoeffer, The Cost of Discipleship (New York: Touchstone, 1995), 44.
[2] Pers. Comm.
[3] Bridget Eileen Rivera, Heavy Burdens (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Publishing, 2021), 38.
[4] Rivera, Heavy Burdens, 36.
[5] For historical background Biblical inerrancy and the rise of American fundamentalism, see Carolyn Baker’s Confronting Christofascism: Healing the Evangelical Wound (Apocryphile Press, 2021).
[6] CS Lewis, The Screwtape Letters (New York: HarperCollins, 2001), 160.
