Queercents

I am sitting in the laundromat down the street, waiting for my triple-washer to finish its spin cycle. The owner has asked me to hang out and talk with him today. “I feel a sermon coming on,” he says.

Father Peter is an evangelical Christian. He’s a priest at a nearby church, as well as the owner of my neighborhood laundromat. He hangs photos of Jesus in the laundromat and says “praise the Lord” a lot. He thinks the only options for Christian sexuality (read: legitimate sexuality) are celibacy or as part of church-sanctioned marriage.

And yet, I continue pumping quarters into his washers and dryers. Read the rest of this entry »

Stuart Jeffries and Stephen Moss of the UK’s Guardian Unlimited addressed who would welcome a recession and who would be hurt by one. They interviewed several religious leaders and got an interesting variety of responses on the Church(es) position on the potential for a recession.

As Lent begins, the church would have us stress simplicity and abstemiousness, purgation and renewal. Might clerics see a recession as an opportunity for people to stop worshipping at the shrine of money and start thinking about what really matters? “There is no wealth but life,” as Ruskin put it. Read the rest of this entry »

A comment left by Plonkee on my last post coinciding with a trip to my local charity shop and used bookstore got me curious about how Christianity has historically affected commerce. I came across a book called Religion and the Rise of Capitalism by R.H. Tawney, an economist, historian, and lecturer at the London School of Economics in the early 1900s. He has been called the “patron saint of adult education.” The book is based on a series of lectures he delivered at King’s College in the twenties.

A quarter of the book is dedicated to a discussion of the development of Puritanism in England. As one of the results of the English Reformation and a sect considered by some to be dissenters from the Church of England, the Puritans, according to Tawney, were marked by “the mere energy of …expanding spirit” and determined to remake their “own character and habits and way of life… family and church, industry and city, political institutions and social order.” Read the rest of this entry »

I was quite averse to attending my first gay pride parade when I moved to Seattle as a young queer. Mustering pride was not high on my to-do list. That was quickly remedied, initially by my very first Dykes on Bikes hard-on, but maybe more importantly, by the older woman who marched by with the sign, “I’m Catholic, and I Love My Gay Son.”

I haven’t found the reconciliation of church as community and queerness to be simple, wonderful, promising, or just the right fit. I’m open to it but tend to lean toward the belief that organized religion of the West inevitably follows the Animal Farm trajectory, eventually destined to a dogmatic bureaucracy (and far, far from a collective spirituality) much like its forefathers. I’d like to be wrong about that. Read the rest of this entry »

After a short break and a focus on grad school finals, the God and Mammon series continues. Welcome back.

Coming out in a religious family or in a conservative church community can be much more difficult than simply taking the standard “going to hell” lecture. At any age, it’s a rough move in an atmosphere where the queer lifestyle is considered “sinful,” but for young people it can also mean the early onset of complete financial responsibility.

A 2006 study, “Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Youth, An Epidemic of Homelessness” by the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force Policy Institute and the National Coalition for the Homeless quotes the U.S. government estimate of homeless and runaway youth to be as high as 1.6 million a year. According to the study, between 20 and 40 percent of these identify as gay, lesbian, bisexual, or transgender. “Given that between 3 and 5 percent of the U.S. population identifies as lesbian, gay or bisexual, it is clear that LGBT youth experience homelessness at a disproportionate rate,” the report’s author, Nicholas Ray, writes. Read the rest of this entry »

As I discussed earlier in the God and Money series, tithing is an ancient and controversial part of Christianity as well as western religion in general. It’s become a tradition in many denominations, but it’s also bound up in fractured perspectives. Many attending churches don’t believe they are obligated by God’s law to give away 10% of what they bring home. It’s simply not stated that directly in the Bible. Others believe it’s an investment, and still others believe that it’s something like lottery: keep giving to God each Sunday and maybe one of these days you’ll be overcome with prosperity. It’s as silly as a pyramid scheme.

This lottery notion is part of something spreading through American Evangelism known as “Prosperity Gospel.” I really like the idea as an idea. And it seems like a simple thing to sell to needy, desperate, and heartfelt individuals, or, on the other hand, wealthy people who believe money might buy some level of spirituality. The idea is that God will plant the seeds of prosperity within the individual who tithes, providing them with great wealth for their investment in the Lord during these “End Times.” Read the rest of this entry »

It took me about ten years to fully deprogram from Christian indoctrination. Indoctrination is more than going to church on Sunday, saying prayers, or having a spiritual life. It’s a system of grooves in the brain along which thoughts role, an internal highway system. A fully indoctrinated person really only has a few options for how to get from point A to B and it’s unlikely, without some external motivator (like sexual attraction, for example) that an indoctrinated individual will suddenly make a shift in the way they maneuver through the world.

I believed, when I came out at the age of nineteen, that the afterlife was the result of willfully made decisions during one’s life, and that the unknown indeed consisted of the dichotomous halves of heaven and hell. When that unmistakable sexual attraction to a woman finally seeped into my verbal center, I was completely consumed and complete, and I was nothing less than entirely terrified. The thrill of being in love for the first time was countered with constant nausea. I believed that the decision before me was one that would impact me literally for “all of eternity.” In retrospect, it seems completely absurd that I was that person. I remember it finally clicking when a lover, who was also a poet, responded to one of my confused tirades with, “but Christianity uses such small language. There are so many bigger, better ways to explain how beautiful the world is.” Read the rest of this entry »

The religious tradition of tithing – the giving of one-tenth (usually of income) – is one thought to have its origins with the Old Testament’s Abraham. Although biblical scholars debate how the giving actually went down, Abraham is reported in Genesis to have donated one-tenth of his war profits to Melchizedek, a prince and high priest. Later on in the Old Testament, the references to tithing indicate that the act may have evolved from the distribution of war profits into more of a compulsory pooling of resources to support the collective place of holiness as well as those dedicated to lives of religion and study. By Numbers 18:21 (the fourth book in the OT), tithing exists as a mandate of Mosaic law.

Worldwide, early non-Jewish and pre-Christian religious societies also established tithe-like practices. Some kings developed “first-fruits taxes” which were used to support the maintenance of holy shrines and feed and shelter priests and other religious figures. Hundreds of monetary collections for religious purposes are recorded, including in Babylonia (modern Iraq) under Nebuchadnezzar, in the Greek temples of Apollo and Athens, various Chinese temples, and in Phoenician society (modern Lebanon and Syria) among others. Read the rest of this entry »