I made a bad mistake recently: I tried to engage a right-wing evangelical Christian in rational debate about homosexuality.
For the umpteenth time, Mrs Eleanor Wright-Payne (obviously not her real name) had written a ranting letter to the Mail & Guardian about South Africa’s ”sewer of depravity”.
In Payne’s lurid fantasy world, gays and lesbians, in the company of prostitutes, gangsters and drug fiends, are sliming out of every manhole. And from her God-inspired word-processor in the suburbs of Durban, she is giving them one helluva klap.
Our exchange recalled a far-left pamphleteer I once spoke to in London. Why did Trotskyists spend so much time fighting each other, I wondered? ”Ideology is a reflection of the class struggle!” he shot back furiously.
The same rigid personality type; the same shining sanctimony.
Like the Trots’ ironclad universe, right-wing evangelism is a closed system of ideas that holds a powerful attraction for the mentally unfree. It is all so stress-relieving; one never has to think for oneself. It is the doubters and ”apostates” who have the problem.
So you don’t want my prayers? (Payne says she has had a quiet chat with the Almighty about ”media sinners”.) Well, that just shows how much you need them. So homosexuals don’t want to be cured? Well, that just shows how ill they are.
It is hard to see in the evangelicals’ self-pride and triumphant finger-pointing much connection with core Christian teachings. They have a particularly strong line in scripture-bashing double-speak, of the type embodied by Christ’s bugbear, the Pharisees.
Consider the call to mercy in the Sermon on the Mount. Bent through the distorting prism of the Christian right, this emerges as support for the death penalty and bans on potentially life-saving genetic research and safe abortion for the poor. Among US evangelicals, the Sixth Beatitude’s call to peacemaking mysteriously translates into flag-waving enthusiasm for bloody foreign wars.
Likewise with religious gay-baiting. Enjoined by the Fourth and Eighth Beatitudes, justice is reprocessed into a fervent campaign to deny gay people the marriage rights enjoyed by heterosexuals. There is no clash between ”God’s law” and the South African Constitution on this issue: legislated inequality is unjust.
But Payne’s pious hypocrisy goes beyond even this. Not content with the usual crude queer-bashing, she offers bigotry under the guise of Christian ”caring”. Based on her deep knowledge of homosexuality, including reading ”hundreds of case studies”, she concludes it is rooted in childhood ”woundedness” that psychotherapy must cure.
Shades of the South African Defence Force, and its failed attempts to ”straighten” gay troopies. It would be interesting to know where Payne gets her quack diagnosis — the modern psychiatric consensus is that homosexuality neither can nor should be ”treated”.
And if it is a clinical condition, why are gay people not flocking to therapists? Because they do not consider themselves ill, unless pummelled into thinking so by propagandists of the Payne variety. Most want to be left alone to lead their lives, unmolested by straight thugs and busybodies.
Christian homophobia is homophobic first and Christian in its trappings, Archbishop David Russell has argued, and the fact that millions of Christians, indeed, whole denominations, do not view gays and lesbians as ”depraved” underlines his point.
Nor does the recurrent whine that the institution of the family is under pink siege hold water. What is suggested — that if gay marriage is legalised, Dad will suddenly elope with Bob, his personal trainer, or move to California in search of an alternative lifestyle?
What really inflames the evangelicals is the flouting of their small-town proprieties — of sex for married men and women in the missionary position only, for reproductive purposes, and with eyes tightly closed, preferably while thinking of Pat Robertson.
Many even see oral sex of any kind as sinful; significantly, it remains a crime in certain ”red” US states.
Nowhere in their hue and cry is there the least sign of the agape — loving kindness — demanded by Christ of his followers.
The truly revolutionary aspect of his ministry, in an age of pitiless warrior cultures, savage punishments and human suffering as a spectator sport, was the message of forbearance, peace and compassion. In place of the ossified moral decrees and rites of the Jewish religious establishment, he offered a situational ethic distilled in St Augustine’s celebrated dictum ”Love and do what you will”.
The moral whipcrackers of the evangelical right clearly cannot get their heads round this. How can any loving relationship be sinful in the same way as murder, rape and theft, which negate the victim? How can Payne sweepingly generalise that same-sex marriage is a ”pale imitation” when many straight unions are a holocaust of emotional and physical violence, and many homosexual partnerships models of mutual love and respect? Which is nearer the Christian ideal?
And who is she to stand in judgement on the likes of Aids activist Zackie Achmat and Judge Edwin Cameron, gay men of towering humanity who have done infinitely more than she has for ”the least of my brethren”?
In a decade or two, Payne’s diehard campaigning will no doubt seem as anachronistic as resistance to female suffrage and the abolition of slavery. Standards are not absolute, and the moral Zeitgeist is constantly shifting.
But in the short run, she and her fellow religious ideologues can do real mischief.
We live in a country where gays and lesbians are routinely discriminated against, reviled, assaulted, raped and even murdered.
In this context, the ”moral crusade” of Payne and the militias of the Christian right can serve only one purpose: to stoke the fires of hatred.