July 4, 2013 By Keisha McKenzie

Going Places

“Oh, the places you’ll go!”

The person who introduced me to this story was one of my biggest adult advocates. It’s the kind of “Go and be!” tale that encourages many of us to leave our nests and move out into the rest of the world to do whatever good we can.

But I didn’t know then that having “places you’ll go!” doesn’t always mean being able to take those you love with you. So while I’ve shared a lot of new places with people I love, going and doing has also involved loss as well as triumph: loss and release have been just as much part of my growth, change, and transformation as have gain and harvest.

Growth is disruptive. Sometimes it’s disruptive in fantastic ways, yielding greater intimacy with others and greater knowledge of ourselves than we thought possible. Sometimes it’s horrifically disruptive, breaking open fearsome nightmares and shadowy neuroses, inspiring us to pull back from the open road and hunker down in the familiar. There’s no way to know outcomes ahead of time.

Along with several other relatives, my mother has missed the guts and beauty of the last four years of my life because her beliefs and assumptions block her from fully entering in. She’s remained my mother and I’ll never close my life to her; she just hasn’t always been able to mother me. She’ll always be my noun yet can’t wholly verb me while unreconciled to who I am and where I’m going.

It hasn’t been my orientation or partners who’ve disrupted my family relationships. It’s not mere difference that sparks conflict but how we render difference, what we label neutral or good and what we label dangerous. Heterosexism has hobbled relationships that I’ve prized and whose deterioration I’ve mourned. Heterosexism: the assumption that only heterosexual people represent the human ideal; that only heterosocial and heterosexual relationships are natural, good, right, or holy; that gay and bi people are broken, disordered, perverted, and abominable, that they’re worthy of pity and prayer as if addicts, adulterers, drug dealers, or murderers.

I exaggerate none of this. My mother once sat on my couch to tell me that she’d have preferred me to be a prostitute than bisexual and would mourn over me as if I were in jail as long as she lived. She meant the words she spoke; she said them as part of her process and because of her religious concern. She didn’t say them to wound me. But intention doesn’t trump impact, and we can’t now recover the years we’ve lost. We can only improve our future together.

Purple-striped jellies at Monterey Bay Aquarium — Purple-striped Jellies at Monterey Bay Aquarium

It’s been more than a year since my mother has verbally or spiritually attacked me, She has not undermined me, my ethics, or my identity in my hearing. She joined the rest of my family and support network in celebrating my doctoral graduation last spring, and I know she’s never stopped caring for me. Still, she struggles to celebrate the me that I am. She lives at the outer limits of the love and embrace that heterosexism and other religious beliefs permit her, and I can’t imagine the conflict that has brought her whenever she’s thought of me or spoken of me with others.

My denomination’s leadership has also been smashing against the outer bounds of its limits in the last few years: General Conference senior leaders sustained their rejection of LGBTI members, wordsmithing a 1996 statement on homosexuality without changing its substance; the British Union Conference formally opposed civil marriage in England, Wales, and Scotland even though proposed legal changes would have no impact on the church’s teachings or practice; and the North American Division president and a prominent Adventist televangelist both pronounced June Supreme Court decisions as perversions not merely of doctrine but also of US legal tradition—as if tradition means automatic validity. Each of these are players in the drama.

It’s the sincerity I perceive in most of these players that keeps me holding my end of our relationship’s rope. I don’t spend much effort on reacting to performed prejudice—discrimination and demonization heightened for an audience, and perfected by Fox News, satellite radio shock jocks, Westboro, and too much public evangelism. That’s not the kind of theater I enjoy sitting through. But sincere souls, I can understand. I can trace their full humanity though they sometimes deny mine. And thanks to my family and denomination, I know not to seek whole-soul nurturing from those who cannot offer it. I know not to beg bread from a quarry or probe for figs out of season. It’s not the season for figs from the Seventh-day Adventist Church, and so I don’t expect to harvest any from it. Yet this doesn’t condemn me to starve.

Hundreds of thousands of LGBTI current and former Adventists around the world have been taught that they’re broken; community affirmation depends on their complying with mandatory celibacy or forming heterosocial relationships. What about them? If the sanctuary is not a sanctuary, where can they turn? Should they seek another sanctuary? Create other sanctuaries with and for other people? If we can’t change the chick’s shell, how do we support the chick so that when its shell breaks, the chick is strong enough to bear the break and deal with the world outside? If your mother can’t mother you, who will mother you and how can you mother yourself?

A kitten strains to hold a rope in its mouth. — A kitten that’s unlikely to give up that string. (c) Calculus Jones

When I lost some nurturers, my library gave me others: when authorities disparaged certain sources, I deliberately sought them out and read them myself. This wasn’t about being contrary (contrariness is no more automatically valid than tradition). It was about learning to evaluate sources for myself. As some of my older sanctuaries proved unsafe, I reassessed the limits they had set for me. When those limits failed to support, challenge, and protect me, I established new ones. When they did serve me, I kept them.

I borrowed, bought, and read shelves of new books that I hadn’t known existed, entered conversations I hadn’t known were happening, and joined communities of thought and practice I’d never had access to before. This was how I gained worlds beyond my inherited shell, worlds that supported me when my native land fractured. Without those worlds or the people I met through them, I wouldn’t have made progress. I might not be here. And I wouldn’t still have places to go.

My mother mothered me well until she discovered more of who I was, until I complicated her hetero-centered view of me and her vision of the life I’d live as an adult. Until I varied from her dreams, she held a very powerful grounding space for me and she’s doing her best to do so again. She cared for me materially when I was well and physically when I was sick. She nurtured me educationally and intellectually; she prayed and modeled for me a sense of God and Spirit. She gave me and my siblings the best of what she had—and still does. I’ve made sure to express my appreciation to her for her effort and bequests, and I’ll always care about improving on her legacies of leadership, poetry, industry, nurturing, service, and strength.

I’m not yet able to mother her materially, but I can recognize when she has hit her emotional and spiritual outer limits, when “the places I’ll go” aren’t places she can join me. I don’t know how her limits might change in the future, and I’m not sure it makes any difference to what I can offer her. My mother has gifted me so many amazing things—what more could I ask of her? I’ll take the unconditionality baton from here.

Thanks, Mum, for everything.

June 20, 2013 By Keisha McKenzie

The Exodus of Exodus International

Earlier this month, I wrote about the Seventh-day Adventist church’s early history with the sexual orientation change effort industry (Part 1, Part 2, Part 3). Quest Learning Center and Homosexuals Anonymous both formed during the same era as Exodus International, a sprawling evangelical organization that taught LGBT people, their families, and their churches that “change is possible.” SOCE groups like these continue today despite advances in science and psychology, law, theology, and social acceptance, and not all of them have responded to these advances by becoming kinder, gentler, or more accurate about their claims.

Exodus itself, however, held its final conference this week. Yesterday its director Alan Chambers apologized to the LGBT community and their parents. He also announced that Exodus International will close and a new ministry will emerge in its place. The website for the new ministry is not yet live and I see no substantive information about it anywhere yet. Even if Reduce Fear’s work with churches is conciliatory, based on Chambers’ comments in his apology yesterday, I expect the new ministry to maintain his core beliefs that LGBT sexuality is morally deficient and that unconditional LGBT acceptance contradicts Christianity.

I am sorry we promoted sexual orientation change efforts and reparative theories about sexual orientation that stigmatized parents. I am sorry that there were times I didn’t stand up to people publicly “on my side” who called you names like sodomite—or worse. I am sorry that I, knowing some of you so well, failed to share publicly that the gay and lesbian people I know were every bit as capable of being amazing parents as the straight people that I know. I am sorry that when I celebrated a person coming to Christ and surrendering their sexuality to Him that I callously celebrated the end of relationships that broke your heart. I am sorry that I have communicated that you and your families are less than me and mine.

…I am sorry that so many have interpreted this religious rejection by Christians as God’s rejection. I am profoundly sorry that many have walked away from their faith and that some have chosen to end their lives…I cannot apologize for my deeply held biblical beliefs about the boundaries I see in scripture surrounding sex, but I will exercise my beliefs with great care and respect for those who do not share them. I cannot apologize for my beliefs about marriage. But I do not have any desire to fight you on your beliefs or the rights that you seek. My beliefs about these things will never again interfere with God’s command to love my neighbor as I love myself. —Alan Chambers

Last night I scanned Twitter to get a sense of the reactions to Chambers’ apology and have discussed it briefly with friends. While some from the LGBT-hostile quadrant of the church immediately raised the “gay agenda” specter or smeared Exodus as “sellouts”, the majority of early comments ranged from cautious surprise to outright celebration. I didn’t see much anger or cutting cynicism from LGBT-supportive people—though it may be much too soon to expect people to have passed all the way through the grief/loss process. Questions about Chamber’s statements are now trickling out and SDA Kinship will be sharing some of these responses to Exodus’ closure from their Twitter feed today.

I looked at Exodus’ closure statement myself, and this paragraph jumped out at me:

Chambers continued: “From a Judeo-Christian perspective, gay, straight or otherwise, we’re all prodigal sons and daughters. Exodus International is the prodigal’s older brother, trying to impose its will on God’s promises, and make judgments on who’s worthy of His Kingdom. God is calling us to be the Father – to welcome everyone, to love unhindered.”

Return of the Prodigal Son (Murillo, — Return of the Prodigal Son, Bartolomé Esteban Murillo (1667-1670) | via the Web Gallery of Art

For most Western evangelicals, Chambers’ claim that “we’re all prodigal sons and daughters” will be uncontroversial. The majority of the evangelical community’s doctrines assume that humans are sin-depraved and experience separation from God if not in conscious relationship with Christ. The parable of the lost boy, a story of grace and embrace in family despite error and failure, is an old cultural favorite. So when Chambers identifies Exodus as that “elder brother,” this rings true for many of those harmed by SOCE organizations, and I can only imagine how difficult it has been for him to acknowledge that role.

But the final turn—from being the older brother to “being the Father”—does not fit. I know that as an evangelical, Chambers does not believe in apotheosis. So “LGBT or not, we’re all God’s children; this is our created and redeemed nature; and our lives will be about being or becoming more like God” cannot be what he means here.

In the bible story, the younger brother returns his father planning to play the servant. His father rejects that effort and claims him as the son he is: this is part of his restoration: that he be the son he is. The older brother resents his brother and their father’s open-armed reception of him, and the story closes with the older brother still outside the party, not yet accepting or extending family grace. I’ve often rewritten this ending in my head, supplying an addendum in which the brother crosses the threshold quietly to thaw over fruit punch. My epilogue reads something like “It took time, but both brothers healed. Realizing what their father had been trying to teach them, the brothers worked on their relationship and the family home became known as a house of love.”

Wouldn’t that the best resolution? That the older brother re-enter the party as a brother, not an overlord? That he restore his relationship, not craft a new superior or inferior one for himself, nor impose a false superior or inferior role on his younger sibling?

So why does Alan Chambers represent Exodus’ role changing from brother and peer to “being God”? If Exodus has already lorded over LGBT people for more than 30 years, why, even now, isn’t it enough to simply be equal? The hardest thing for beneficiaries of artificial hierarchies may be to lay their status down and stop grasping for new and improved ways to pick it back up. For those trodden by hierarchies, the hardest thing may be to shed temptations to inferiority or counter-supremacy, and to accept that we too are our Father’s children.

Should Chambers choose this path, with others who abandoned him long ago because he wasn’t harsh or separatist enough for them, he and they’ll find me by the fruit punch. I promise to save them a cup.

Picture of a Sherbet-punch recipe, with glasses. — via The Shiksa in the Kitchen

June 7, 2013 By Keisha McKenzie

Filling In the Gaps: Sexuality and the Seventh-day Adventist Church III

In Part 1 of this series, I reflected on the Seventh-day Adventist denomination’s influence on the sexual orientation change effort (SOCE) movement since the 1970s and its lobbying against civil initiatives for LGBT people to the present day. Then, in Part 2, I suggested that the limits of our church “mother” can inspire us to grow, that this growth is part of our ethical and moral maturity process, and that extending the conversation about sexuality and gender beyond what the denomination has offered to date is an important way for us to care for ourselves while caring for the community that shaped us.

I would like to make it clear… that I do not blame my parents for their point of view. There is an expiry date on blaming your parents for steering you in the wrong direction. The moment you are old enough to take the wheel, responsibility lies with you.” —J.K. Rowling at Harvard, 2008

Part of my process growing into adulthood has been acknowledging my responsibility. I don’t assume responsibility for the premises and limits that others taught me, but I do assume it for how I frame gifts as I become conscious of them, and how I write these gifts into the life and experiences I share with others. As Rowling told Harvard’s Class of 2008, there’s an expiry date on blaming one’s parents, so if there ever was a time when I might have considered blaming my family, church, or cultures for what they passed down to me, that time has long gone. I accept responsibility for my life.

I grew up as the last child of Jamaican parents in the United Kingdom during the 1980s and 1990s. While most of the events described in Part 1 were unfolding in the North American Division of Seventh-day Adventists, I was 3,600 miles away in a part of the Adventist community that included Caribbean immigrants, West African immigrants, a smattering of Filipinos, and a small minority of White English and native European people in congregations outside of London.

My 500-member congregation had a very strong lay leadership tradition, and during the early 1990s my mother was one of four women called to the role of elder. From these and other lay leaders before and after my baptism, I learned a great deal about how to teach, share, and support an active congregation. I learned how, under the church’s wings and the wings of my Caribbean immigrant network, to live distinctly from the wider society: we were trained to be Daniels who lived impeccably in both friendly and hostile circumstances, dared to vary from our peers if the cause was honorable, and never brought embarrassment to our faith or Afro-Caribbean culture.

Despite that training, I don’t recall learning how to examine myself as an individual, to situate myself in my several communities and negotiate their competing claims on me. I don’t recall seeing my full reflection in the faces of the elders who surrounded me: I saw partial reflections in this speaker, that artist, this teacher, but never felt wholly mirrored. I knew that I was a member of my immediate family and community family; I didn’t fear being abandoned by them. I saw that I was loved by each of these circles (if not understood) and that my community’s achievement expectations for me were high (they still are!). I thrived academically and otherwise, but did so while not fully recognizing myself in the lives or experiences of any one I knew.

I was about 17 years old and studying at an Adventist college in Jamaica before I met someone who knew he was gay. We became close friends, siblings-but-not-by-blood, and yet our closeness didn’t include his identity or relationships until five years later. We spent our time discussing culture, politics, regional differences, spirituality; we talked in generalities about attractive people and the life lessons we were learning. But in our first five years as friends it never occurred to me to inquire about his orientation or relational life. He didn’t inquire much about mine—and there was little to tell. As much of my own sexuality was still in shadow, I didn’t see his; I simply didn’t ask.

I know now that at least two boys from my English high school were gay; while we were schoolmates, their bullies had tormented them for not being athletic or “manly” enough. But at the time I never made the leap from their gender expression to their sexuality, and I don’t know when they made that connection for themselves. I have no comparable stories about English or Caribbean women to share.

Like many Adventist youth, I’d received the Ellen White compilation Messages to Young People as a baptismal gift and read it; I’d also been given John F. Knight’s books for teenagers, What a Young Woman Should Know About Sex and What a Young Man Should Know About Sex. These church-approved sources were supplemented by classes at school and my parents’ direct contributions at home. My mother and father, a registered nurse and social worker respectively, may not have been comfortable with all of my questions, but they usually responded by being frank and clear, dismissing baseless myths and scare stories, and suggesting that we research what we didn’t know. I’ve kept this model as an adult: it still helps me to fill in the gaps I’ve discovered along the way.

I cannot explain why, despite the parents, books, and cultural and congregational influences that I had, I still came into my 20s with no hook to hang my growing awareness of myself on. Yet that is how I found myself in 2008—hook-less—and so I began to build from scratch. I spent the next 4 years studying classic materials and contemporary research on Christian history and theology, gender, sexuality, and ethnicity, working with credentialed counselors, and rebuilding my inner relationship circle. It was an amazing period—equal parts insight and horror, with much of the latter channeling through some of my religious relatives and my denomination. I do not blame them for the role they played during those years. I also had many angels, guardians, and friends, and was not alone.

On this side of the process, though, I sometimes imagine the SDA community being so committed to realism about sex, gender, and relationships that our scholars led the wider Church’s conversation. It saddens me when I see us trailing the rest of the Church with groundless 20-year-old talking points, or expelling leaders for being current or compassionate. It’s possible I’d be writing a different story today if my imaginary denomination were real.

At the same time, I’ve met hundreds of LGBT Adventists in the last several years, all shaped by the sources I’ve mentioned or others similar to them. Some of these people were caught up in the “reparative therapy” at Quest Learning Center and survived to share their stories. Others passed through other orientation change ministries and are grateful today to have made it out alive. Perhaps it’s been to our collective benefit that our church hasn’t led the pack: as things stand, the teaching we’ve received has tended toward suppression, occlusion, fear, and the dysfunctions that naturally flow from them. More of that is not what we’ve needed. By filling in the gaps beyond the church, we’ve instead worked to build personal and collective awareness that this life is an opportunity to develop loyalty, joy, care, pleasure, faithfulness, patience, understanding, and love.

Rowling’s metaphor for adult living is “taking the wheel,” but I’ve experienced it as something less mechanical and fraught than highway driving can be. For me, shaping an adult life is more like tending a garden, noting how seeds and plants grow, which kinds of nurture and resources they need, how good they are as neighbors to other plants, what outcomes they produce, and how each plant is its own kind of beautiful. It’s about development and learning in place, harvesting and stopping to smell the flowers; sometimes, too, it’s about sneezing from the pollen and uprooting plants that don’t fit. I’m still in the midst of the tending process as I write this article, and I expect to keep tending and enjoying this garden for the rest of my life.

June 5, 2013 By Keisha McKenzie

Caring for Our Mother: Sexuality and the Seventh-day Adventist Church II

In Part 1 of this series, I described the Seventh-day Adventist church’s approach to sexuality as a “spell” that dissociates members from themselves, confines them to different-sex relationships or self-suppression, and encourages them to lobby against civil laws for LGBT people in North America and internationally as well. [1] With a handful of doctrinal premises, a few has controlled the many.

But this isn’t the only part of the story that I want to tell. One of John J. McNeill’s contributions to my thinking is the idea that it is psychologically critical for a child to come to terms with his or her parents’ limits—and this acceptance must apply to our religions of origin as well as to our biological families of origin. According to McNeill, our Church Mother also merits our recognition and acceptance; she too reaches the outer bounds of her capacity as we grow; she too fails us and not always out of conscious malice. Her efforts have caused us objective harm, but as we mature, we have opportunities to care for her regardless of what she has said and done. The last few generations of LGBT children have lived out this model vividly: an increasing population of declining parents looks to these far-from-the-tree children for their elder care, and most of us are providing it.

I wrote that the Adventist church administration withdrew from healthful and helpful service to its gay members after its first official meeting with SDA Kinship a few years before I was born. This may have been the worst possible choice for the church and yet it was probably the best outcome for LGBT Adventists. By abandoning the LGBT community during decades that involved deep, significant changes in psychology, medicine, church history, theology, public health, and public law, the church forced LGBT people and the heterosexual Adventists around them to go beyond the church’s borders for fact-based insight, the latest research, thoughtful biblical interpretation, principled exegesis and application, and practical policy and pastoral guidance for homes, schools, and congregations.

I view the church’s treatment of non-hetero sexuality as a more extreme edition of its approach to human sexuality overall. But as McNeill has written, the failures of our church mother can spur us to grow up. Without coming to the outer limits of her capacity, we might never have learned to seek, to engage reality directly and without using her as mediatrix for our unfolding understanding of ourselves or our callings. In growing up, we develop moral sensibilities and ethical agency. And we can choose how to apply what we’ve come to know in our relationships with other people and those institutions that shaped us.

It is now 2013. SDA Kinship will host its 34th international meeting this year. I am 30. And the Seventh-day Adventist church is still a full two years away from reporting on “alternative sexuality practices”—a remit that, at best, represents a gross misapprehension of the science of orientation and gender and frames human variation in terms of misbehavior. The committee conducting that study was announced at the 2010 General Conference session and is due to produce its report in the next two years. Without any information on this committee’s membership beyond its chairman, and with its only preliminary contribution a doubling down on the church’s 1996 statements, I can’t vouch for the value of its outcomes or its relevance to my generation or the younger people who follow us and wish to remain a part of the church. [2]

Would my denomination ever dare to call Blackness an “alternative ethnicity”? I’d hope not. Yet some of its most vocal speakers and authors over the years have framed European and White American worship styles and music customs as the norm from which other cultures vary at their spiritual peril: ethnocentrism is an old art. Even if current membership trends continue and South American, African, and Asian divisions move to the center of the institutional wheel, their centering after years of marginalization will still fall far short of “unity in diversity” or any other model of organic collective flourishing. Imbalanced relationships among constituents undermine the grounded, healthy development of any group deemed an aberration rather than a variation. The church’s heterosexism has long produced these outcomes.

It doesn’t matter to me which of us get to live at the center of the wheel if some of us are relegated to the outer ring. I don’t believe the Incarnational Kingdom of God is about inner and outer rings, and, unlike the orientation change ministries I described in Part I, I don’t hold a theology of sexuality based on separation from our Creator and Source, regard a hetero orientation as the inverse of others, or represent LGBT people as “heterosexual people with a homosexual struggle.” That is not what they are.

Yet I believe it’s important for the General Conference’s committee to complete its work and report on sexual and gender minorities 35 years after ministers first recommended the study.

Even if

the church has preemptively described orientations other than heterosexuality as “a manifestation of the disturbance and brokenness in human inclinations and relations caused by the entrance of sin into the world;”
a number of church members and LGBT people have already plugged out of this conversation because it does not reflect the realities of gender, intersexuality, or orientation;
the committee intends to represent heterosexuals as normative and all others as deviant;
by 2015 we’ll still have no rounded theology of relationship, creativity, commitment, or celibacy, and still lack a model for organizational and spiritual vocations that evaluate members based on gifts rather than gender or marital status; and
no LGBT Adventist has been invited to join the General Conference’s committee in studying the Bible, Adventist tradition, or current knowledge about the LGBT community

—it is still important that the church administration continue its process.

The next generation of Adventists deserves the best its denomination can offer, not as the end of conversation but as the start of it. The church’s contributions in the next few years will influence the climate in which youth grow and adults endeavor to shepherd them: even as our societies change, the church’s statements, retractions, explanations, and pronouncements will continue to matter.

Unwillingness to discuss openly is devastating: silence and shadows never saved a soul. So the 2015 study is important for the health of my church and its members. I have wondered whether it’s even more important that pastors, teachers, counselors, parents, and friends continue their personal learning and dialogue, though they’ve explored their questions so far with very limited support and in some cases active resistance. As Protestants, we have no Magisterium, and we also share with the various Catholic and Orthodox traditions a reverence for discernment and conscience. Neither discernment nor conscience is based on stubbornly abdicating continuous learning.

So, whatever the church’s judgments in 2 years, everyone in the wider Adventist community has opportunities to co-learn today. Some church members and former members are returning to this common learning table thanks to their relationships with LGBT people and to the documentary Seventh-Gay Adventists (SGA), which has screened in small groups since February 2012.

The movie does not pretend to see or tell all; it is situated in particulars and as such it has limitations (I’ve discussed my thoughts with the director personally so am not writing out of turn). SGA‘s focus on couples, gay and lesbian individuals, and the lives of people resident in North America means that the Adventist community has yet to hear from unmarried, bisexual, intersex, or transgender people, and we’ve not heard the range of experiences that LGBTI Adventists have outside the United States or Canada, sometimes supported by their ministers and sometimes publicly demonized by them.

Despite these limits, SGA doesn’t seek to end the conversation: it is an extremely charitable contribution to a relationship that needs more charity, and it has resonated with people from all sides of the table. I know the filmmakers hope that others will tell their own stories just as Jill and Sherri, Marcos and Obed, and David and Colin told theirs. The isolation of the status quo isn’t good enough for any of us, and our church, our “Mother,” will benefit from learning with us.

“Homosexual people eagerly wanting to live the Christian faith, could they do it in their specificity, not in isolation or [outside the law], but also in the shared wealth of the ecclesial community? Would it not be desirable that these brothers and sisters in Christ are respected and accepted as people with an infinite value in God’s eyes?

… No one can be forced into belief and response.” —Ethics Committee of the Franco-Belgian Union of Seventh-day Adventists, March 2013

In the third and final part of this series, I will share how this context has shaped my life and relationship with the Seventh-day Adventist Church.

—
[1] Sample lobbying in North America: Vermont, Canada, California [AB 1976 & Proposition 8], Maryland, and Washington state; sample international SDA lobbying: the Netherlands, Kenya, Uganda, and England. Additional links were shared in Part 1 of this series.

[2] Shortly after this article was first published on June 5, I received a copy of the committee’s appointed membership. The 50-member group is dominated by General Conference and world division church administrators, and includes only 1 woman.

June 3, 2013 By Keisha McKenzie

The Magic of Shame: Sexuality and the Seventh-day Adventist Church I

The few can’t control the many by force. —José Barrera

José Barrera defines magic as the ability to change reality by influencing others’ beliefs and consequent behavior. His argument is that magicians are not mere illusionists like those featured in The Prestige; they are people and groups who invoke their authority over others and use it to direct others’ decisions and actions. By impressing audiences to bind themselves to an external authority, a magician’s successfully cast “spell” means that the bound person internalizes the magician’s injunction and carries it out whether the magician is present to reinforce it or not.

Digital illustration: temple in background, black woman in foreground — Credit: “Egypt” by ProcerKhepri

While many Christian denominations oppose “magic” on the basis that sorcery is forbidden by the Bible, there may be no more vivid example of belief-and-behavior influencing, reality-changing magic than evangelical-fundamentalist teachings about sexuality.

Last fall, I found an archival issue of Spectrum Magazine, the journal of the Association of Adventist Forums. That issue, from 1982, included reports on the first annual meeting of Seventh-day Adventist Kinship International, quotes from several attendees, and an opinion piece from Colin Cook, a Seventh-day Adventist ex-pastor who at that time was still touring Adventist churches and publications to promote himself as “living proof” that one could be delivered from one’s “homosexuality problem.”

I believe the ideas of a harsh or distant father and a dominant or binding mother are correct… The primary cause [of homosexuality], in my opinion, is the spiritual shame that all mankind experiences as a result of the Fall. —Colin Cook on the origins of homosexuality, Ministry, 1981

Cook was one of two men who launched the gay conversion step ministry Homosexuals Anonymous in 1980. Like the church-promoted ministries that have succeeded it, HA operated on the assumption that homosexuality was an unnatural, immoral corruption of heterosexuality, an “escape from reality” rooted in postlapsarian alienation and sexual shame, and a sinful condition whose impact could be lessened or eliminated via prayer and therapy. On these principles, Cook also ran an SDA-funded orientation change center for gay men in Reading, Pennsylvania, called Quest Learning Center.

Among LGBT Adventists, Cook is infamous not only for securing General Conference funding and support for Homosexuals Anonymous and Quest, but also for orchestrating at least two series of client abuse at his Reading and Colorado centers (1986, 1995). Cook had been removed from ministry in 1974 after having sexual contact with one of his male congregation members. However, while receiving church funds and fielding inquiries from young men through the late 1970s and 1980s, Cook promoted “homosexual healing” as his experience and an achievable outcome for others in publications like the Adventist youth paper Insight (1976, 1978, and 1980), the church’s pastoral journal Ministry (1981), and the evangelical magazine Christianity Today (1989), and in other sponsored forums across the country.

Since 1993, Cook has continued to encourage others to “come out of homosexuality” and “develop heterosexuality” through a new Colorado-based company and online radio broadcaster, Faithquest. His site’s legal disclaimer notes that he is not “licensed as a psychotherapist or psychologist, nor registered as a counselor in the state of Colorado or any other state in the United States or any other country.”

The Seventh-day Adventist church withdrew funding from Cook’s projects around 1986, but has never withdrawn its support for Cook’s “overcoming” dogma. That dogma has recently resurfaced in Adventism, and overcoming-homosexuality tours have resumed in congregations and conferences around the United States; in Uganda and Kenya; Wahroonga, Australia; and other receptive sites worldwide.

Reading Spectrum‘s 1982 report, however, was like being sucked through a wormhole into an alternate universe where the Seventh-day Adventist church hierarchy and LGBT church members conversed openly, not merely to build mutual understanding, but to actively address pastoral, spiritual ministry to non-heterosexual church members. On this side of the wormhole, however, no such free exchange exists. The church pastors and other workers who had attended SDA Kinship’s first meeting had reported back to the denomination on what they’d observed and made nine key recommendations for future action.

Thus, before I was even born, a group of pastors, scholars, and one “ex-gay” counselor advised my denomination to “set up a special subcommittee to study thoroughly the whole question of homosexuality and the church” and to recognize SDA Kinship as a ministry to, for, and with Adventists with non-heterosexual orientations. This group also advised the church to take other actions, including developing a comprehensive “balanced and responsible” sexuality curriculum for Adventist church schools. Such a curriculum would help to ensure that K-through-college students would have a fact-based, engaged space in which to grow, learn about themselves, and discern both what God required of them and how they should shape their adult lives in line with that discernment.

None of these things happened. In fact, church workers were later discouraged from interacting with SDA Kinship and, in the 1990s, the denomination sued Kinship in California courts for using the name that still identifies the majority of Kinship’s members and allows new members to find it. Whereas the church workers who had participated in the Kinship meeting advised the church to draw near to its non-heterosexual members, the church instead withdrew.

Over the next two decades, Adventist unions and church officials actively lobbied voting members and civil governments to block or undermine legal rights and protections for LGBT people, including in Hawaii, Massachusetts and New England, California, Florida, Scotland, England and Wales, Uganda, Maryland with the support of NOM, and Australia (March 2012 Message from Greater Sydney President) with the support of the Australian Christian Lobby. Public health research is now showing a correlation between legal restrictions on LGBT rights and increased anxiety, mood disorders, alcohol-related disorders, and stress-triggered conditions like hypertension and depression for the LGBT people in that climate. The church’s lobbying pattern continues nevertheless.

How could one calculate how many people have been influenced to define and approach LGBT people as immoral representations of sin and satanic deviance thanks to the teaching and practice of the Seventh-day Adventist denomination? I don’t know, but I’ve come to realize that church-driven shame about sexuality cannot be maintained without the active or unconscious effort of ordinary people.

“The church” follows no one through life; it’s in no one’s wedding party, dinner table, prayer house, or bedroom. But we are in all of those places, and to keep the dogma alive on the church’s behalf we must first dissociate from ourselves. The process of being the church’s proxy in our most intimate spaces splits us as we learn about and experience our own sexuality. Any resultant shame only dissipates as we re-integrate and no longer cede room to soul division: if we don’t cooperate with the “less than” spell, we cannot be shamed into compliance with flawed definitions and inappropriate limits. The church’s spells invoke powerful magic over millions of current and former members, and those able to breach those spells pay in years to do so.

In Part 2 of this 3-part series, I will discuss the implications of this history, notable exceptions to it, and where I see the church today.

April 22, 2013 By Keisha McKenzie

Speaking as Myself

My friend Teagan hosted a really powerful conversation this weekend about what it means to be an ally to a community and how to speak with its members rather than for or in place of them. [1]

I come into the ally/narrative conversation shaped not just by my direct experiences but also by the body of narratives that catalyzed the British and American anti-slavery movements.

Who May Speak for a Slave?

Narratives shaped the 18th-19thC conversation about slavery as a legal institution and cultural practice. Some of those narratives were written by former slaves and free people like Olaudah Equiano and Frederick Douglass. These storytellers recorded their experiences, published them, and toured their respective countries to speak about them. Other narratives were written by slaveholders/plantation owners to describe plantation life from their point of view and to justify the slave economy in the face of nascent criticism. Still other narratives were written by abolitionists like William Wilberforce and Harriet Beecher Stowe.

Not surprisingly, while Britain and the United States wrestled with slavery, the narratives with the most popular credit belonged to White abolitionists, slaveholders, and a certain kind of former slave: a Black gentleman or gentlewoman with refined social manners, self-taught or classically educated as far as he or she could be, and publicly pious. These were the narratives given platform space and amplified.

I’ve seen a similar dynamic in every social movement since abolition: not all stories are equal; social norm-compliance buys airtime and social credit; allies can be contradictory and not all endorsements are consistent. Given this inconsistency, I’ve learned not to conflate “anti-slavery” and “pro-Black” or “anti-discrimination” and “pro-equality.” Objecting to legal discrimination or social cruelty is not the same as fully supporting a population, especially once that population expects to be judged on its own terms and not by the measure of other groups. So those who work against social and legal discrimination may still hold onto overt and subtle prejudices about the people we work with: being a community’s ally in one sense does not necessarily mean being its ally in all senses.

Conflicting Support

Harriet Beecher Stowe’s _Uncle Tom’s Cabin_ (1851-2) exemplifies this. Its author, a White woman, was an abolitionist and teacher. Building on the stories of former slaves, Beecher Stowe depicted “kind” and “cruel” slaveholders, and also featured Black slaves as major, sympathetic characters. [2] By the 1860s, her story was galvanizing abolitionists and helping to turn public sentiment against the worst of the slave economy.

At the same time, the book relied on an abridged and patronizing view of Black people, and its benevolently racist stereotypes still surface in US media and public sphere conversation 150+ years later: the noble-faithful Uncle Tom, the loyal, religious, and ever insightful maid and wetnurse, the wild child. Beecher Stowe didn’t invent these tropes; she merely built her story around them. I do not question that she was an anti-slavery ally, considered slavery immoral, and had good intentions for her art.

A story can have a positive impact in the short and long term while also collapsing audiences’ view of reality and their view of the subjects represented in that story. In the same way, it is possible for a story to open up an audience’s view of trans* or gender variant or LGB people while also using conceptual shortcuts and assumptions that don’t serve the wider community well. [3] This doesn’t mean that only some stories should be told. I think it means that more stories should be told overall, more thoughtfully, more assertively in some cases, and more humbly in others. Stories are powerful and some of them can cast a long, long shadow. That scares me sometimes, but it also helps me to be conscious about my impact on people and communities I care about and not focus only on my hopes and intentions on their or our behalf.

The Stories I Tell

As part of its community outreach program and at the invitation of local college professors, PFLAG-Lubbock has organized panels of members to talk with counselors and teachers-in-training about identity, diversity, family dynamics, being an ally, and ways to increase understanding of gender and sexual minorities. I joined my first panel about three years ago. It was the first time in a long, long time that anyone had asked me to tell my story, to share from my experience what the world looked like from where I stood, to speak as myself. Whenever I spoke, it felt good that I was never offering classes a “single story” about my communities because those panels were always set up to support a broad range of perspectives and experiences. There were times when panelists disagreed and yet we didn’t gloss over those differences: there are already too many spaces where disagreement is misconstrued as disloyalty. “Diversity” spaces don’t need to mimic that.

I still tell my own story more informally from time to time, and I also speak about my perception of others and their stories, but whenever I do either of these things, I do so knowing that a story changes in the telling no matter who it’s about. In the years I told stories in Texas and in print, I noticed how much my narratives changed as I did. I drew from a consistent file of characters and events, but my interpretations evolved, and I also began recounting some experiences less while talking about what I’d learned from them more. If stories that I know are sound can vary this much, how much more might there be a fidelity gap between the stories others tell about themselves and the way I’d render their narratives? Because of our psychological and experiential distance, I can’t tell The Story of You as well as you can, and you can’t tell The Story of Me as well as I can.

One of my life lessons is this: When I see and experience this world, I do so as me. I never do so as another soul, never as they’d see or experience this life, and never as they’d wish I’d see it. So whenever I speak outside my experiences, I necessarily project in some way; I’m perceiving, translating, re-framing, and then re-publishing. I’m in constant conversation with others, too, and we’re all shaping our stories together, Yet the only original story I can tell is my own.

I find it keeps me honest to recognize that this is what it means for me to tell stories about my life and about others’ lives; this is what it means to build knowledge and understanding with others. It also seems to help my peers and audiences to acknowledge that this is what we’re doing, because in coming to grips with this, we’re challenged not to seek a fixed and universal truth from the stories we tell to each other. For the Christian fundamentalists I know, that’s a tough sell, but then some of them also struggle with the premise that our particular experiences are not inferior to an idealized and universalized experience: universalized experiences, after all, are only a slice of the world used to colonize the rest.

When I do speak up on my own behalf or with others, my stories about myself and my perceptions aren’t less important than others’ stories and perceptions. Stories I’d tell about myself are not less important than those others will tell about me. But they are different. They can’t be substituted without loss. And the wider world often treats my stories as less important. It also treats the differences I naturally add to the mainstream as annoyances or something “more difficult” that we’ll all “get to later.” That approach has real relational consequences and we live those consequences every day. I think the whole is diminished because of this approach. So I speak up about that when possible.

I don’t believe any of this means we all need to stop telling stories or building knowledge together. I believe it means we need to tell more stories, not fewer. And all of us, the storytellers used to being sources of The Story, need to recognize that our special standing is a dysfunction that we can and should dismantle in all the ways we can.

[1] Today is the birthday of an ally who stood with me as I learned to speak as myself and for myself. I still hope to offer others the kind of wholeness she offered me. CKR: b. April 1954 – d. April 2010. C., thank you so much.
[2] The “kind” and “cruel” slaveholder distinction only makes sense on one side of the table—not my side!