A friend of mine was born intersexed. This rare condition affects people both psychologically and emotionally. They are born with both male and female sex organs, so have difficulty deciding whether to live as man or woman. Perhaps one in a thousand South Africans, like my friend, lives with this condition, whether they like it or not. It’s the way they are. Fact of life.
Homosexuals do not have unusual sex organs, but they do have a different sexual orientation. They are born with a psychological and emotional orientation towards people of the same sex.
One woman states: “I find myself deeply attracted at a very physical level to some women. I yearn to share my life with another woman and sometimes I ache … because there is a part of me that is not filled.” Some men feel the same way towards other men.
“People need to understand that being homosexual is neither an illness nor a disorder,” says Nonhlanhla Mklhize of the Durban Gay and Lesbian Community and Health Centre. That’s the way they are. Fact of life.
It is not rare. About a 10th of the population is gay or lesbian: three in a class of 30; 20 dancers at a disco of 200; 200 in a church congregation of 2 000 on Sunday mornings. But, because the rules are made by the great majority, who are not homosexual and do not understand their orientation, God help the homosexuals.
But does God help? Many religious people have attacked homosexuality as a heinous sin, an evil to be cast out and a devilish distortion. Some, from cardinals to bush Baptists, have condemned homesexuality as unnatural and something to be rejected.
Others disagree. “Same-sex orientation is not in itself a sin and not in itself contradictory to Christian faith and life,” says the Methodist Church.Â
Anglican Archbishop Winston Njongonkulu Ndungane says the debate about homosexuality is not going to go away, but should continue in a spirit of tolerance. Throughout the world the church is being challenged on its basic attitudes.
Those who claim that “the Bible condemns homosexuality” need to be careful. Scripture certainly condemns lust, but that applies to the misuse of all sexual activity. Only three texts appear to specifically denounce homosexuality. Two, from Leviticus 18.22 and 20.13, see it as an abomination that should be penalised by death. But few people who use these texts to condemn gays and lesbians would have them killed as scripture commands. They recognise that, just as Jesus moved beyond the law of Moses, so God has guided us to progress beyond the need for the death penalty. They believe that humanity has evolved since the days of Leviticus, in this and many other ways. Why is it they feel they know better than Leviticus with regard to killing, but not with regard to homosexuality?
Paul’s condemnation of those who indulge in “shameful acts” (Romans 1.26-27) is also instructive. Walter Wink, a professor of religious studies, points out that Paul had no concept of homosexual orientation. (The word was only coined in 1869.) Paul had no idea that homosexuality was natural to many people. Neither did Paul make the distinction between sexual orientation — over which we have little choice — and sexual behaviour, where we make moral choices about responsibility, love, promiscuity and lust, whoever our partners are.
Recent advances in biology and psychology have removed many of the uncertainties that induced such phobias about many sexual attitudes in the past.
Behind the debate on homosexuality is the dispute between fundamentalists, who see faith in terms of obedience to the dictates of religious institutions that lay down the laws, and those who see faith as a response to a living spirit of God.
“Churches … often believe they can impose their values on the world,” writes theological author Ronald Nicholson. “But the world, in the form of human society, imposes values on the church too.”
The Bible sets out an unfolding and developmental view of human awareness that constantly challenges inherited concepts with the spiritual progress of the human community. Human sacrifice and ritualism were replaced during the Old Testament period and attitudes to gentiles, women and the poor changed in the time of the New Testament. Jesus was killed precisely for questioning the religious traditions of his time.
There have been constant developments in the 2 000 years of Christian history. Slavery, the oppression of women, the divine right of kings and men, the deification of wealth and the glorification of race have all been defended by religious institutions on the grounds of scripture; and defeated on the grounds of obedience to the Spirit.
In South Africa our reluctant acceptance that Church institutions that supported apartheid were heretical and the shift to major identification with the struggle, demonstrates how it works.
Many “straight” Christians will identify with the words of the Methodist statement that “repents of any attitudes or actions of the church that may have resulted in the stigmatisation of homosexual people and in their alienation from the mainstream of church life, and humbly seeks their forgiveness wherever this may have happened”.
This is a far more godly approach than that of people who insist their God-given duty as Christians is to impose their beliefs on everyone else. They are sincere, but sincerely wrong. Churches have done this in many spheres, often denying that God can speak through Jews, Muslims Hindus, traditional African spirituality, or agnostics.
Some say that we live in a post-religious age, because millions find inherited religious traditions and attitudes irrelevant or misleading. But that is only half the story.
Spirituality is alive and well. It is the consciousness of caring for people as they actually are and the recognition of their huge positive influences in our communities. It rejects the caricature of religion, politics and economics, which supports the violent imposition by the West of the globalised worship of Mammon.
The percieved “horror” of the homosexual debate splitting the church should be welcomed, not feared. Such self-examination has been the sign of progress throughout history — thank God it is happening again now and that our country is being shaken by it.Â
God is helping not only the homosexuals and the intersexed, but all who are determined to liberate religion and rediscover the power of spirituality in the secular process of being human.