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Will Ex-Gay become an ex-phenom?

Wednesday, November 30th, 2011

Wayne Besen of Truth Wins Out is reporting tonight that Exodus international may be on the verge of collapse, for financial reasons—chiefly a bad real estate investment. The hidden story, apparently, is that this “ex gay” ministry has not been able to continue to raise funds effectively enough, and is struggling to repackage or re-brand itself.

In light of the continued shift of some mainline denominations toward full inclusion of sexual minorities, including the Evangelical Lutheran Church in Canada a few months ago, and the Presbyterian Church USA a few months before that, it would seem plausible that the donor base for the anti– and ex–gay organizations may be shrinking if not imploding. More and more people who still don’t really “approve” of gay/lesbian folks, are resigning themselves to the shift of contemporary culture, and are less committed to funding every effort to block civil rights or offer alternative psychiatric methods to erase same-gender sexual orientation.

The “ex-gay” movement, characterized by the derisive slogan “Pray Away the Gay” is especially troubled in that its anti–gay message clashes with the core Christian Gospel that proclaims the unconditional love of God for all people. Their only “yes but” to the open-hearted love of God in Christ is to continue to insist that being a sexual minority is a terrible, wicked sin. That view stuck, of course, for generations. But people today are wise enough to realize that 100 years ago, or 500 years ago, everything was a terrible wicked sin. People today see the honest lives of lesbian and gay couples, transgender individuals who are calmly and rationally asking for understanding, and bisexual persons who are “whoring after” both genders. They see ordinary people who have jobs, homes, relationships and contribute enormously to society. They see married same-sex couples in 6 states, and the U.S. military having opened itself to transparency and honesty with regard to the humanity and sexuality of its service personnel.

So characterizing lesbian/gay people as extraordinarily evil, or crying continually that we will all go to hell is about as convincing as a tattered old Fred Phelps sign and a cranky voice behind a megaphone. Fewer and fewer people pay attention.

Read Besen’s entire posting here: http://www.truthwinsout.org/pressreleases/2011/11/20563/ where he also has links to every fact or rumor he cites.

—Pastor Dan Hooper

Posted in Bible & Interpretation, Doctrine, Ex-Gay, Fundamentalism, LGBT Christian, Recovery, wingnuts | No Comments »

The elephant of privilege.

Saturday, November 26th, 2011

One of the ELCA blogs caught my eye because of this single word:  “privilege.”  It is about time that it gets called out in public discussion. 

RE: Hunger Rumblings http://blogs.elca.org/hungerrumblings/post/privilege-22112011/

I was surprised that this post, while taking two paragraphs to set a context for his observation, never connected the dots between lack of privilege, hunger and justice. People with privilege— certainly a group larger than “the 1%” identified by the Occupy Movement—actively resist not only the loss of their privilege but even the identification of their privilege as such. They rationalize what they have as necessity, or earned, or in their contract or as the result of doing “nothing illegal.”

There are many voices in the current strident partisanship in America who decry the sense of “entitlement” in programs for people at the bottom of society, and from that argument they are earnestly trying to unweave our badly-frayed safety net for the poor/elderly/hungry/vulnerable. Ironically, the most strident voices are themselves coming from the most privileged segment of our society.

Privilege itself has balkanized our society. It is the “elephant in the room” of political discourse on many hotly-debated matters, including federal bail-out programs, immigration reform, and access to health care, education, jobs, and criminal justice. Even the sexuality wars of our times stem from the sense of entitlement which heterosexual people typically feel gives them the right to deny equality before the law to LGBT people.

Unfortunately, a sense of privilege has long since permeated the mainline church, especially in those denominations and congregations that cater to suburban upper/middle class (and mostly white) people. This sense of privilege is a cancer which continues to attack the very heart of the Gospel of Jesus. Need we look any further than the Beatitudes (Matthew 5:3–12, the Parable of the Judgment (Mt. 25:31–46), or the Rich Man and Lazarus (Lk. 16:19–31) to see where privilege or lack of privilege is found in Christ’s teachings?

But privileged Christians can begin the “critical self-reflection and repentance” to which Creech refers, and hopefully resist the corrosive power of privilege by seeing what we have not as privilege but as gift. It is easy to rationalize our privilege as entitlement. Before God none of us has, or deserves, privileges. But that truth should not be easily “spiritualized” as simply a matter of forgiveness or justification by grace (gift) alone. All that we are, and have, and hope to do with our lives, are gifts of God. Even that we can get up every day, and use our health and wealth productively, is a gift. We do not deserve life itself. Life is a gift.

We have all heard the lame jokes about a family sitting down to a table of leftovers where someone who thinks it is unnecessary to give thanks says “This food was already blessed once before!” But when I give thanks at each meal, it is not the food which is blessed. I am blessed that I am able, once again, to eat. So recognizing that our whole lives are gifts may help us to begin to see those all around us for whom food, health, shelter, safety, dignity and justice are all still deeply felt hungers.

—Pastor Dan Hooper

Posted in Bible & Interpretation, Health, LGBT Rights, Living by Grace, Public Affairs, Uncategorized | No Comments »

Will disobedience be successful?

Wednesday, September 7th, 2011

U.S. Catholic’s web site is running a story (thank you Eric for letting me know!) that trouble is brewing in the Catholic Church in Austria, where more than 400 priests are calling for disobedience if there are not massive reforms in the church.

Perhaps Martin Lutheran was nearly 500 years ahead of his time. Or not, since it is quite possible that official retaliation for disobedience will simply come down on the heads of at least some of these 400 priests. Remember who is Pope right now, after all.

But the issues, which all revolve around the church’s medieval attitudes on human sexuality and hierarchical authority, are worth reviewing: the celibacy rule, the treatment of lesbian and gay people, and divorced/remarried people.

From the British Tablet editorial on this disobedience, “point: “They are right that what Catholics hunger for, and not just in Austria, is a Church of integrity, without hypocrisy, doublespeak or pathological denial.”

The pastoral reality–the reality in the parishes and among faithful Catholics—and everybody else in the world of faith—is that official teachings are not only often at variance with how people need to live their lives, those teachings do not enhance the credibility of the core Christian message.

I am reminded of developments in the business world, where major corporations in the last several decades have spun off or sold off subsidiaries when times get tough. Often their official spokespersons tell us that the company will now focus more tightly on its “core business.”

Although the church is not a business, it does need to jettison what ever doesn’t serve its core message, and that message is the grace of the Gospel of Jesus, and the call to follow him in paths of generosity, mercy and compassion in this broken world. Upholding twisted or strained official rules of extreme moral strictness has become an impediment to telling the world about the love of God in Christ.

Yes, celibacy is an ancient Christian practice, but it never caught on universally until it was forced on the priesthood in the Dark Ages. Yes, the Scriptures frown on unchastity, divorce and remarriage, but the definitions of those terms has slipped over and over down through time, and Jesus never condemned the woman at the well who had apparently been married five times and was living with a man who was not her husband, nor did shame her for her difficult life. In other words, it was not a “deal breaker” for her hearing and receiving grace.

As for the treatment of gay/lesbian people (can we be more inclusive, with bisexual and transgender people, too?), history has ample evidence that the modern condemnations being read out of the Bible by conservatives and fundamentalists were not read that way for more than 1,000 years after Christ. I am still impressed with the scholarly work of Prof. Theodore Jennings, who authored The Man Jesus Loved, which lays open some of the covert gay stories of the Gospels.

We have struggled with the issues surrounding homosexuality in the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America for several decades, and the conclusion of thousands of people is that we simply cannot summarily condemn gay and lesbian people because of two or three references in the Bible any more than we can forbid Christian women from serving in ordained ministry because of one or two citations. The grace, acceptance and reconciliation of God overshadows everything else. Period.

John Paul II commented officially years ago that women could not be priests because Jesus chose only male disciples. Well, Jesus only had Jewish disciples too, so that logic would have kept both John Paul II and Benedict XVI out of the priesthood. My point is that arguing over the trivial rules of the church is ultimately not successful—even if the conservative side insists it has a lock-tight argument—because its logic, authority, high-handedness and even cruelty to individual believers is increasingly rejected by 21st century people of faith.

One of the most appalling weapons used in the Catholic Church is to silence dissent with papal authority. Significant theologians have simply been banned form public teaching, speaking or publishing—not much different than burning dissidents at the stake as the Catholic Church did 500 years ago. I would not be surprised if the leaders of this “disobedience” move in the Austrian church will face similar silencing moves from the Vatican.

But how long will it take before all the thinking faithful are silent and faith itself will simply wither away because the content of what is left will only be faith in authority, not in the Gospel of God’s gracious reconciliation with humanity. Sooner or later, the church must also reconcile with the world as God has done, or it will continue to be working with futility against the will of God.

— Pastor Dan Hooper

Posted in Bible & Interpretation, Catholic matters, Doctrine, Ecumenical Issues, History | No Comments »

Touch us gently.

Tuesday, August 30th, 2011

As many of readers of Indwelling Spirit may realize by now, I scribble little “Notes to Self” and don’t get back to them right away. They clutter my desk and brief case and bedside table. Sometimes, months later, these notes take some deciphering, and as I get back to this blog after many months of being overwhelmed by other responsibilities, I am evaluating some of my own scrawled notes:

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Each of us probably remembers this feeling from a doctor or dentist visit: We have pain. The “spot” is very sensitive. We know that this needs the attention of a professional, perhaps even a specialist, but we brace ourselves against what might be careless or overzealous medical attention. “Please be gentle!” we scream under our breath just before we are touched, poked, probed —or drilled!

When someone tells me about a pain they are having, or their story of a recent doctor visit, I am thinking, “I know exactly how you feel,” because I have had similar experiences where a pain was deep or sharp and I found myself pleading for gentle treatment.

Spiritually, there is an important parallel here. We may be living with a lot of pain, spiritually. It takes awhile for it to build up to the point where we recognize its symptoms, or are ready to talk about it. Yet we are really reluctant to take our inner emotional/spiritual pain to a specialist—to a counselor, confessor, pastor or spiritual director.

Why do we avoid getting spiritual help when we are in pain?

I suspect that often the reason is that we don’t expect we will be treated gently, either by a counselor/pastor or by God. Many people have experienced so much judgmentalism, rejection, and threats of punishment from religious figures —and told they can expect the same from Almighty God!—that they avoid taking their spiritual symptoms to them.

All of us have been poked, probed, drilled, scolded, and pushed away at some point—at a very sensitive point in our lives—when what we really needed was a gentle touch or a hug, not a lecture, scolding, ultimatum or damnation.

Time and time again this has been especially true for LGBT people. We have symptoms of emotional and spiritual distress. We hurt. It has taken a lot of time for many of us to bring this pain to the surface, and to recognize the symptom of our deep discomfort. We’re not sure of ourselves let alone sure of our relationship to God.

But because of either our own experiences or those of friends, we avoid seeking counsel or guidance for our spiritual lives, because we cannot take any more harsh treatment. Some of us just go on living with the pain rather than seeking a specialist that can help clear it up, because of the risk of spiritual mistreatment or harm. The so-called Ex-Gay campaign, for example, has been unmasked as an effort that subjects gay people to immeasurable pain and mistreatment.

Often I try to explain to non-gay church people what the significant pastoral and spiritual issues are for LGBT people. Some of these people are sympathetic enough to recognize the prejudice and rejection that lesbian/gay people especially have experienced. But because they are in the sexual majority, not sexual minority, they do not fully understand or fully feel the pain that we talk about.

Yes, there are many other Christian people out there who are not sympathetic at all. They continue to finger the same few “clobber” passages in the Bible, and point to them with a sharpened index finger, like a doctor thumping on a medical manual at the possible diagnosis. And because they are so certain of their allegiance to God as they understand him, they almost aggressively attack the wounded or the hurting with this “immutable” word of the Lord. An old saying expresses this pretty well: The church is the only army that shoots its own wounded.

God does not approach us that way. If anything, God touches all who are in pain, all who have open wounds, more gently. God’s approach to our pain or suffering is an embrace, not a probe or poke or drill. From the Lutheran rite for Confession and Forgiveness (Summer 2011), “As tender as a parent to child, so gentile is God to us. As high as heaven is above the earth, so vast is God’s love for us. As far as east is from west, so far God removes our sin, renewing our lives in Jesus Christ.”

If we would simply look again at even a handful of the stories in the Gospels about how Jesus approached people in pain, we would clearly see this gentle approach: the woman caught in adultery, the woman at the well (who had already been married 5 times), the rich young ruler, Nicodemus, Zaccheus, Thomas the Doubter, Judas Iscariot, the soldiers who crucified him, and the thief on the cross.

To be sure, Jesus often does challenge people to put greater trust and faith in him, or to turn their lives around (“Go, and sin no more”). But his spiritual approach is always gentle. I might even speculate that Jesus had heard of the Hippocratic Oath (5th Century B.C.), to which this classic phrase is often traced: primum non nocere, “first, do no harm.” It certainly calls for reflection for those of us who are spiritual guides, counselors, confessors and pastors, and especially for those who are LGBT people of faith.

I have a definite sense of what God’s gentle touch means. (See my essay, “About Jesus,” for example.) Obviously, a lot of rock-hard conservative clergy and laity wouldn’t agree with me, and they can drill their forefinger into the pages of the Bible to “prove” it. But as I’ve said before, “God’s Word for us is always an invitation, not an ultimatum.” And you can quote me on that.

—Pastor Dan Hooper

Posted in Bible & Interpretation, Coming Out, Doctrine, ELCA, Ex-Gay, Fundamentalism, Gay Catechism, LGBT Christian, Living by Grace, Ministry, Spirituality | No Comments »

Baptists are far from clear.

Saturday, June 18th, 2011

On the religious front, a “teachable moment” mysteriously opened up this last week in– of all places–the Southern Baptist Convention’s convention being held this year in Phoenix Arizona, when a coalition of representatives for the LGBT movement met for a half hour with the President of the SBC.

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Apparently the meeting was “entirely cordial,” but the Baptist President Bryant Wright didn’t budge from his fundamentalist interpretation of the Bible. Wayne Besen of Truth Wins Out was there, as was Mitchell Gold and Brent Childers of Faith in America and Robin Lunn of the Association of Welcoming and Affirming Baptists. The Baptist Press, quoted by Besen, indicates that Wright refused to budge, “saying that Scripture is clear on the issue.” (Any resemblance to Scientology’s use of the word “clear” is coincidental and irrelevant.)

Right there we have a great example of sheer posturing, since any serious theologian in the last 100 years has said that Scripture is not clear about what we now call homosexuality, because the Biblical writers didn’t have any understanding that homosexuality even existed.

(Other things that are “clear,” meaning that they’re in the Bible in black and white, but far from clear, include other sexual matters including polygamy and adultery, marriage and divorce, celibacy and even masturbation.

To his credit, Wright admitted to his own “incredible amount of sin,” and admitted that God loved everybody in the room with him (the homosexuals). But he attempted to mask his rigidity by saying “I hope you all would respect that we’re just seeking to follow Jesus.” Ahem, Mr. Wright: Jesus never condemned adulterers, healed the “boy” (lover) of the centurion, and had his own serious boyfriend, the “beloved disciple.” Sexual wrong-doing or even excess simply didn’t figure highly in Jesus’ message or ministry, but condemning self-righteousness did.

The only thing that is really clear is that the SBC is clear that it is unwilling to re-think its superficial, rigid, lock-step interpretation of theology on sexual matters—and a lot of other matters as well. In short, the SBC answer to the reality that different Christians have come to differing conclusions about human sexuality and homosexuality is that everybody else is wrong.

At least the Southern Baptists were cordial throughout, according to their own press corp. It is was a historic first for some significant gay spokespersons to actually sit face-to-face with an “enemy” leader.

— Pastor Dan Hooper

Posted in Bible & Interpretation, Doctrine, Fundamentalism, LGBT Christian, Sex | No Comments »

We are a Sanctuary.

Thursday, June 2nd, 2011

As our church polishes us and celebrates the recent completion of new things in our sanctuary (such as flooring and pipe organ), my mind turns to the significance of the sacred space, what it has meant historically as a place of prayer and sacrament for nearly 90 years, and what it should mean in the lives of Christians—not just here but everywhere.

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The idea of Sanctuary is an ancient one. A sanctuary is not merely a sacred space where we can pray to God, but a safe space from the anxieties, terrors and violence of the world around us.

From time to time, churches also serve as a refuge or sanctuary for illegal immigrants, for runaways and for the hungry and homeless. Battered wives have fled to the church as a place of safety, hiding and understanding. After natural disasters, many people who have been displaced by fire or flood have come to churches seeking help and temporary shelter.

Hollywood Lutheran Church is a sanctuary for sexual minorities (LGBTQ etc.), people in recovery from alcohol, drugs and other addictions, people living with HIV/AIDS, people of color and everybody else who suffers discrimination, and even inmates and parolees who are shunned even after they have “paid their debt to society.”

We don’t just sit in a Sanctuary to pray! The purpose of the Christian Church everywhere should be to enlarge the Sanctuary of God’s love and compassion, and to become a living sanctuary of people committed to mercy, safety, healing and wholeness.

There is no place in our church for judgmentalism, rejection, hatred, prejudice or fear. The Christ we know in faith—who on the Cross gave up his life for our sake and took away the sins of the world—is a Lord who seeks the lost, upholds the weak, feeds those who hunger and thirst, and reveals the light of God to anyone who struggles against the darkness.

If that sounds over-dramatic, it shouldn’t. Christians are in a life-and-death struggle with evil in the world. Every day I see the ruins and results of evil—broken lives, fearful people, indifference or hatred. In the midst of this world, there is no reason to be “religious” if not to follow in the steps of Jesus Christ. And if we follow Christ, we must be the change we want to see in the world. We must be the sanctuary to which others may come and rest and pray and feel safe. This is true religion . This is the life of faith.

—Pastor Dan

P.S. If you’re curious, here are some key Bible passages about sanctuary: Psalm 20:1–5, Psalm 28:1–3; Isaiah 8:13–14; Ezekiel 37:26–27; Hebrews 10:19–24.

Posted in Bible & Interpretation, Doctrine, Faith, History, HIV and AIDS, Homophobia, LGBT Christian, Living by Grace, Ministry, PRAYERS, Recovery, Spirituality, Uncategorized, Violence | No Comments »

Day of arising.

Saturday, May 7th, 2011

The Easter hymn comes to mind tonight:  “When we are walking, doubtful and dreading, blinded by sadness, slowness of heart; yet Christ walks with us, ever awaiting our invitation: Stay, do not part.”  It is based on tomorrow’s Gospel text from Luke 24, the “Road to Emmaus” story.

On Thursday, our friend Jeffrey was finally released from state prison—one month late due to the passive-aggressive incompetence of our state department of “corrections.”

Jeffrey is a gay man who was part of our church community, even though actually homeless when he was nabbed for a technical violation of his parole—failing to report his whereabouts to the parole officer.

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Our “criminal justice” system is broken.  In California it eats up about as much as our entire educational system, some $10.5 billion a year.  The California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation admits that more than 95% of that monstrous sum goes to simply keeping inmates locked up.  Prisons are running at over 200% design capacity.  Actual “correction” or “rehabilitation” scarcely happen at all.  Job training is spotty and inadequate.  Those inmates who never finished high school may only be permitted to take one class per week toward their G.E.D., while prison guards have the money sewed up and take home huge sums of overtime pay.  Medical care is equally spotty, and we know inmates who have had to manipulate the system just to get a nurse to see them.  There really is no such thing as counseling available to inmates, and it is extremely onerous to get the permission needed to visit inmates as pastors or volunteer chaplains.

Gay men are still targets in prison, and get raped—often by guards, not other inmates.  (See Just Detention International.)  We know of inmates who got HIV while doing time.  One straight inmate has gotten himself permanently into Ad Seg, or Administrative Segregation, so that other inmates don’t hit on him or try to beat him up because he is not real masculine-appearing.  How do we know he’s straight?  He serving time for raping his girl friend (even though she was living with him at the time, but that’s another symptom of a broken justice system).

I wouldn’t have thought so, but transgender M2F (male to female) inmates have it easier, and often find a straight protector in a fellow inmate who likes having someone feminine around for friendship and privileges.  We’ve had some difficulty with one transgender parolee, who looked for the same sweet deal “on the outside,” expecting someone would protect and support her.

It is hard to get an accurate picture of the system unless you get to know the people who have been swept into its grasp.  Voters see periodic reports that California has the highest recidivism rate in America, but according to the UC-Irvine Center for Evidence-Based Corrections in September 2005, “Two-thirds of California’s offenders return to prison within three years, but more than 50% of those offenders are sent back for parole violations alone, a rate considerably higher than in other large states.”

Such parole violations may sound serious, but how they are defined is itself often at the whim of the system which is abused not only by the guards union but political opportunists.  They have created a climate of “lock ‘em up and throw the key away” at the same time we don’t have enough money for education or the decent humanitarian care of our most vulnerable citizens.  As if the Three Strikes Law weren’t ineffective enough, in 2010—thanks to governor Arnold Schwarzenegger—Chelsea’s Law added to the insanity of Jessica’s Law, making it almost impossible to live in an urban county in this state if you are a sex offender.  (This is on top of Megan’s Law.)  The two options for such parolees are idiotic: either you declare yourself homeless, in which case the public is no safer if it doesn’t know where you are from night to night; or move to a rural county where there are no jobs or future, increasing the likelihood that parolees will eventually turn to criminal activity just to eat and stay alive.

Yet the CDCR and parole system requires parolees to return to the county in which they were originally apprehended.  We were working with another gay parolee a few months ago who did not want to return to the central valley county where he had been mixed up with local gangs that got him into trouble in the first place.  He had the official promise he could return instead to Los Angeles, where there was a support network waiting to help him start a brand-new life. But the minute he actually got our on parole, the parole officer changed everything, had him nabbed for a parole violation for not returning to his home county, and forced him back into the very criminal environment he was trying to avoid. As a result, he has disappeared.

Yet Christ walks with us, even as we try to carry out the mandate of Matthew 25:36. Tomorrow Jeffrey comes home to our congregation, to meet the people who have kept faith with him for three years of imprisonment.  Thanks to the vision of church members, we’ve been able to visit him twice in prison, write frequently, send him supplies and accept collect calls from prison several times a month.  Tomorrow is a homecoming, even though he still faces homelessness, unemployment, and three more years of close surveillance under parole. Yet Christ walks with us!

—Pastor Dan Hooper

Posted in Bible & Interpretation, LGBT Christian, Ministry, Public Affairs, Sex | No Comments »

The devil doesn’t frighten me.

Wednesday, May 4th, 2011

Be careful what you pray for. We have an interesting legacy of hands-on Bible Study in our parish, complete with all the urgent shouts of differences of opinion. It took us 9 months, for example, to slog through the Gospel of John verse by verse.

And when it ended we took a survey of what people wanted to study next. Guess. People want to study Satan, and tonight was the opening volley of our local war of good against evil.

Of course, we pray constantly for all people, dozens of them by name on Sundays, Wednesday and Thursdays, including those who are suffering from addictions, mental health problems, unemployment, homelessness, you name it.

And tonight three guys walked in who are not part of our “usual crowd,” two of whom I knew from prior episodes and one I’d never seen before. One is a known drug addict who thinks he is serving Jesus by preaching to the wackos on Skid Row but has himself never mastered his addiction to crystal meth. Another is certifiably mentally ill who cannot stop talking and making grimacing faces as if he is digging deep into intellectual turf. And the third turned out to be a raving fundamentalist who wanted to make sure we are a Christian Church before he would sit down, and later admitted he is homeless. This on top of several other “regulars” who tend to dominate, act out or digress into tabloid news, pop psychology or Dan Brown-esque conspiracy theories.

All true Christians, of course, show up for things late, and that meant that our special friends tonight were the first ones there. I was praying next not for the homeless, the addicted or the mentally ill, but for a very fast-acting dose of patience. Jesus, you promise you will never test us with more than we can handle (that is the Bible, isn’t it, however obliquely?), and I don’t think I can handle three at once with special needs.

But we launched the study of Satan with some general observations that people tend to believe stuff about Satan, the devil, evil and human nature that are not grounded in the Bible but mostly shaped by pop culture. In truth, pop culture has always yanked the chains of Christian theology and has been doing it for thousands of years.

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We started with a verse-by-verse reading of Genesis 3. As improbable as it is, I had to argue for a mythic reading of this story–a story of talking snakes and the low-hanging fruit of good and evil. People want to believe the story is literally true—fact—because they think that somehow they are honoring the Bible and showing their loyalty as believers. Then the grimacing man asked in all seriousness if scholars have ever researched what kind of tree it was and what kind of fruit Adam and Eve were eating.

Hello? Lord, please show me some mercy. Help me show them that a parable is a story with Truth of far greater significance than the kind of fruit or the talking snake. A parable is not untrue just because it has no historic facts in it. If we obsess about the facts we will likely not be paying attention to the Truth even if it bit us in the heel!

What we will agonize about in coming weeks of course, is whether there is such a creature as Satan, the Devil, as an individual being who is God’s nemesis and truth’s antithesis, who is able to take over the brains and fates of all human beings at will. The idea that the Devil is God’s evil counterpart, with nearly all the same omniscience and omnipotence to inflict suffering, is largely non-scriptural. Such an idea entered into the western pop psychology thousands of years ago as their contemporary answer to the problem of evil in the world and the human aversion to responsibility for ourselves, our lives and relationships, and our world.

It may be a tough sell that Satan is the personification of evil run amok in the world–the aggregate of thousands of frailties, selfish choices, avoidance of spiritual struggle, and indifference to the suffering of others. Evil takes on a life of its own, I keep saying. If, as the homeless man said tonight, we leave an open door, evil will enter. That is not paranoia, but an understanding that evil seeks opportunity like seeds seek a crevice in the earth and water seeks its own level. Think Osama bin Laden, who is his madness and contempt opened every door he could and squandered much of his own $300 million fortune causing untold human suffering.

Where do the mythic and screwball images of the devil in our culture come from?— think of the evil child horror movie genre. Think “The Exorcist” (which grossed over $400 million, the most “successful” horror film ever), or “Rosemary’s Baby” or “The Omen.”

The screwball stuff does not come from the Bible. In my opinion, the Bible does not have an elaborate “doctrine” of Satan, assigning him great supernatural power over humanity for two reasons: (1) it believes that Almighty God is the source of all created things, all good, all power, all blessing, all purpose and all destiny; and (2) it believes that humanity is responsible for our own errors, failures and rebellion against God.

Two quotes to end this reflection, the first from Leo Tolstoy: “All that is necessary for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing.”

And this from the late M. Scott Peck (The Road Less Traveled, People of the Lie): “The whole course of human history may depend on a change of heart in one solitary and even humble individual–for it is in the solitary mind and soul of the individual that the battle between good and evil is waged and ultimately won or lost.”

— Pastor Dan Hooper

Posted in Bible & Interpretation, Doctrine, Fundamentalism, Go figure!, History, Ministry, Recovery, Violence | No Comments »

The Religious Reich’s moral pipe bomb.

Tuesday, March 29th, 2011

Well as March runs out, Wayne Besen never misses a thing of interest. He heads up Truth Wins Out, which he started to counter the “Truth Won Out” pray-away-the-gay movement. the graphic is from Besen’s site; you can read it more easily here.

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What is so transparent in the Harvard thing here is that Wallnau is trying to position his group or himself in the midst of the public discourse. Commentator Besen calls it red meat rhetoric.

And did we catch the “us who are Christians”? The phrase is not incorrect, but it’s opportunistic. Christians are not all of the same mind. Wallnau has no more moral authority to speak for “us who are Christians” than I do. He apparently wants Harvard University to bunch all LGBT people, abortion, all Muslims and “the financial collapse” in the same pot. “Ain’t it awful?” we used to say. Tsk, tsk.

Transparently, he positions the “us” opposite the “you”: “you remove God from public discourse.” Who is he speaking about here? You who? Obviously in his opportunistic world of us-and-them, the “us who are Christians” are meant to be opposed to the you” of “your homosexual activity, your abortion activity,” and “you” who “removed God from public discourse.”

Nobody has removed God from the public discourse. Almighty God, who is Play-Doh in the hands of demagogues, has never been more in the public discourse. As the partisan right wing tries to make everything there is into a political issue if it can benefit from it, the religious reich tries to make everything there is into a religious issue if it can benefit from it.

Certainly, there are issues of profound importance to America and to all human beings, which deserve public discourse, but which do not directly involve one or another religious view of God. Jesus was wise enough to distinguish between the things that belong to God and the things that belong to Caesar (state), Mark 12:17. There is a moral issue in the abortion debate, for example, that is not directly a religion issue, but Christians have differing views of the moral factors in anyone’s decision to have an abortion. And some people who differ profoundly on religion may be on the same side on abortion, for example.

Wallnau’s “baiting” over Islam is especially odious, because there are some of “us who are Christians” trying to promote serious and responsible dialogue with the adherents of Islam about our views of God, revelation, obedience, morality and peace. But to suggest that “You’ve got Islam invading the United States,” as Wallnau did last fall, is irresponsible and only brings more shame on Christians in America. Red meat rhetoric is the moral equivalent of a pipe bomb, and the religious reich doesn’t seem to give a rip about that.

Worse, these people are extremists even for religious wing-nuts. Besen quotes Rev. Bill Harmon, for example, who states that Leviticus requires “the penalty of death, bareness or excommunication” for adultery, etc. and “any sexual activity other than between husband and wife.” Not sure what bareness means to him, but Rev. Bill apparently hasn’t read the Song of Solomon, where erotic pleasure is beautifully described in some detail, and the lack of an actual marriage in the relationship is unmistakable. And, Rev. Bill, if you would check Matthew 1:18–21, you will see that when Joseph and Mary were betrothed, and he thought she must have committed adultery because she was pregnant, but he understood Leviticus to allow him to break the engagement quietly and not hurt Mary. If this was good enough for Joseph and Mary, why is Rev. Bill Harmon trying to incite the masses and beat the drum for the death penalty for any morality that doesn’t fit his personal preferences?

The quote from Dr. Pat Francis is pure “woo woo religion.” If he weren’t wasting his breath about “false religion” (in a nation which guarantees freedom of religion), maybe he could pay attention to James 1:27: “Religion that is pure and undefiled before God is this: to visit orphans and widows in their affliction, and to keep oneself unstained from the world.” In other words, do some actual good for people who carry heavy burdens, and practice self-discipline in the things you think are not right for you. If such people don’t believe in abortion, then don’t have one. If they don’t like homosexuals, then don’t be one. If they don’t like Islam, then don’t convert to Islam.

But as to the “financial collapse,” they’re on their own. Jesus is opposed to serving both God and money anyway, according to Matthew 6:19 and 24. “Do not lay up for yourselves treasures on earth,” says Jesus. “You cannot serve God and mammon” (money). I know, that won’t go over very well among the economic/political/religious right wing, but then they don’t pay close attention to the Bible anyway. I am sure the Social Transformation Conference will find a way around the teachings of Jesus and the Bible. Such people always have.

—Pastor Dan Hooper

　

　

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White privilege rejects Jesus’ social values.

Tuesday, March 8th, 2011

I’ve been trying to figure out this Tea Party movement since it began catching headlines, but it seems not so much like revolutionaries throwing tea chests into Boston Harbor as much as loose cannons firing on anything. Or is it mostly the same old white conservatives saying, “We’re cheap as ever and we’re not going to pay for it anymore.”

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(A conveniently forgotten aspect of the Boston Tea Party is that the rebels who dumped the tea in a protest against taxes had dressed themselves up as “Indians,” in effect to hide their true identities and to scapegoat others.)

Geoff Farrow’s Current Blog has a rambling half hour speech in Wisconsin from filmmaker Michael Moore insisting that America is not broke. According to Moore, “400 people in America have more wealth than one half of the entire population of the United States of America. Those 400 individuals have more wealth than 155,000,000 people do.”

So it’s plausible that the tea party is revealed as the wealthy few agitating not just for no taxation without representation, but no taxation of them, period. Specifically, they are angry about the white privileged class being taxed to support the underprivileged class.

But I have had other nagging suspicions about the motivation of tea partiers. All of this would just be mere political finger-pointing, except that there is a strong religious connection.

The Pew Research Center has released a new study, citing exit polls from last November’s election, that reveal tea partiers as being largely white evangelical Christian Republicans.

“Does the movement draw support across the religious spectrum? Or has the religious right “taken over” the Tea Party, as some commentators have suggested?”A new analysis by the Pew Research Center’s Forum on Religion & Public Life finds that Tea Party supporters tend to have conservative opinions not just about economic matters, but also about social issues such as abortion and same-sex marriage. In addition, they are much more likely than registered voters as a whole to say that their religion is the most important factor in determining their opinions on these social issues. And they draw disproportionate support from the ranks of white evangelical Protestants.”Reflecting on the research, a sociology professor at Pitzer College in Claremont, Phil Zuckerman (co-authoring with Dan Cady), has characterized the religious/political connection of the tea party is sharper contrast in a Huffington Post article, “Why Evangelicals Hate Jesus.” “White Evangelical Christians are the group least likely to support politicians or policies that reflect the actual teachings of Jesus. It is perhaps one of the strangest, most dumbfounding ironies in contemporary American culture.”The irony—which the Pew Forum research would seem to support—is that contemporary American Christianity has become a smorgasbord at which you can choose what you like and ignore the rest. “People look at the content of their religious tradition—its teachings, its creeds, its prophet’s proclamations—and they basically pick and choose what suits their own secular outlook.” So white evangelicals pick only the parts of the New Testament Jesus and that message that makes them feel good, and ignore those things that call for love, compassion and self-sacrifice. “Jesus unambiguously preached mercy and forgiveness. These are supposed to be cardinal virtues of the Christian faith. And yet Evangelicals are the most supportive of the death penalty, draconian sentencing, punitive punishment over rehabilitation, and the governmental use of torture. Jesus exhorted humans to be loving, peaceful, and non-violent. And yet Evangelicals are the group of Americans most supportive of easy-access weaponry, little-to-no regulation of handgun and semi-automatic gun ownership, not to mention the violent military invasion of various countries around the world. Jesus was very clear that the pursuit of wealth was inimical to the Kingdom of God, that the rich are to be condemned, and that to be a follower of Him means to give one’s money to the poor. And yet Evangelicals are the most supportive of corporate greed and capitalistic excess, and they are the most opposed to institutional help for the nation’s poor — especially poor children. They hate anything that smacks of “socialism,” even though that is essentially what their Savior preached. They despise food stamp programs, subsidies for schools, hospitals, job training — anything that might dare to help out those in need. Even though helping out those in need was exactly what Jesus urged humans to do. In short, Evangelicals are that segment of America which is the most pro-militaristic, pro-gun, and pro-corporate, while simultaneously claiming to be most ardent lovers of the Prince of Peace.”This lays bare the classic distinction between the religion of Jesus (“I was hungry and you fed me, I was thirsty and you gave me drink, I was naked and you clothed me…) and the religion about Jesus (“praise the Lord! He’s the greatest!”). While Zuckerman’s editorializing analysis pushes the hypocrisy to the extreme, the distinction, the black and white contrast can be stated quite simply: there is nothing in the ethical demands of Jesus in the New Testament that supports the astonishing materialism of our times, and the public squalor/private wealth which this supposedly “Christian” nation now reveals.And for me it confirms a point I’ve been gently bringing up for a long time: because we each have our own political views as well as religious values, it is critical for each of us to understand which is driving which. Do our political views select our religious values, or do our religious values shape our political views? Which one has greater influence on our decisions? Which one is in the driver’s seat?

— Pastor Dan Hooper

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Score one for parody.

Wednesday, March 2nd, 2011

He must be dancing a jig tonight, that the U.S. Supreme Court has decided that it’s a free-speech country and Phelps can demonstrate his particular brand of hatred at military funerals.

This is two decisions about free speech rights and the First Amendment in two years. the prior one was the idiotic decision that corporations can spend an unlimited amount of cash to sway public opinion and therefore to buy elections.

The Supreme Clout does not mean the highest wisdom, apparently.  But who am I to question free speech?  I am, however, deeply disappointed that only Justice Alito dissented from the majority opinion. Where were our so-called liberal justices on this?  But free speech itself–especially in this day and age of Twitter and Facebook influence over global events—is extremely important even if it can be used by people on the wrong side of virtually every moral issue (as I believe Phelps is).

But I do think that this is still a moral victory for our side, because Phelps and his little tribe of hate-mongering imaginary Christians are pretty exposed out there. Many other Christian preachers and churches have staked out their market share based on their hatred of abortion, homosexuals, you name it. But nobody is joining Phelps on the streets in front of funerals. Nobody else has web sites quite as filled with deranged, Gadhafi-like rambling.  Fred “God Hates Fags” Phelps stands pretty much alone.

And I kind of think that when he croaks (or when God’s long-suffering patience is finally exhausted), nobody else is likely to pick up where Phelps leaves off. Maybe because Phelps’ command of irreality has been too sweeping.  It was not enough for him to say God hates fags. He has to say that God hates America for tolerating homosexuals.  God hates Sweden, too.  And God hates Canada.  But that God hates and therefore kills U.S. Marines because America tolerates homosexual expression is a bit more than a “stretch” even for most Christian fundagelicals. At Godhatestheworld.com, Phelps gives you an country-by-country explanation of his godly opinion.

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And if Phelps himself is not a living parody on homophobic ministers, other people’s parody is the best revenge. For example, God Hates Figs (It’s in the Bible, read: Mark 11:12–14!—all a matter of interpretation.) And if you have time, check out Hank Moody’s book God Hates Us All. Entertainment, I guess.

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Enjoy the new irreality in America, thanks to John “W” Roberts, whose sense of justice is certainly a parody all its own.

—Pastor Dan Hooper

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Conversation with enemies in Christ.

Thursday, February 10th, 2011

I feel like I am sitting “behind enemy lines,” writing from the environs of Ft. Myers, Florida. The dominant culture of Bible-believing fundamentalism is everywhere to be seen, in a countryside awash in independent little churches surrounded by big parking lots.

In fact, I am already sweating where we can go to worship this coming Sunday, as an openly gay couple would probably be about as welcome as a fly in your sweet tea.

But the environment underscores the deeply-divided character of American Christianity. Having grown up in the Lutheran fold, I experienced first-hand the arrogance of a fine tradition that really did believe and teach it was “the only true church.” But with the rise of evangelical fundamentalism in the last two generations, I have had more of a taste than I wanted of arrogance coming from the religious right. The reactive and even hateful rejection of progressive denominations (still populated with faithful believers even in declining numbers) by those who push “decision” theology and “born-again” self-congratulatory piety, is annoying at best and deeply painful beyond words. I have often thought that if the only choice in the Christian church of the future were American fundamentalism, I would simply cease to be a practicing Christian.

Fundamentalists should not take this as a sign of my liberal or sinful theological weakness. But I still feel so strongly that fundamentalism is not the true Christian faith, and certainly not a faith I can live by.

But I stand as indicted as anyone. Too many of us are not as concerned about unity of witness and mutual love as we are about being right. And the “other guys” are, of course, not right in my (not-always humble) opinion!

Truth check: If what divides us gathers more power than what unites us as Christians, what divides us has become our idolatry.

God is all powerful. God wills our unity in Christ. We are not seeking

God’s will for the church if we continue to insist that we are right and other Christians are wrong. In other words, dismissing other Christians as wrong is not an answer to the premise that Christians are to be united in love. We cannot simply reject the faith of others as if it is not Christian.

But we are still left with the problem of how to tolerate those other Christians who disagree with us so profoundly. There is little choice, of course, except to be in conversation with people we don’t agree with and–because of the balkanization of the Christian world—don’t really like. I feel as much anguish about this as anybody. Conversation with those who seem to share the same faith but talk about us as if we are enemies, takes nerves of steel and confidence that we have received the grace of God and the guidance of the Spirit—that we are not misled or self-deceived. We must, in short, have absolute faith equal to the absolute faith of those who see the world so differently.

I am not ready to offer any keen new wisdom that resolves all of this, except to look back at my own thoughts about idolatry. If I want to steer clear of idolatry, I must be willing to steer clear of my own certitude or smugness, my own need to be right in every instance, and to put nothing in front of me except the will of God that we all have the same mind and heart as we have in Christ (Cf. John 17:20. Philippians 2:2, 5–11). Yes, it’s a tough assignment, but if the real good news of Christ is to ever reach the people of our times, it will only be if we can “get over ourselves,” turn aside from our own idolatry and do as Christ has asked.

Meanwhile, it’s Thursday and I need to find a place to go to worship on Sunday.

— Pastor Dan Hooper

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I believe, I know, and I have hope.

Saturday, January 29th, 2011

Tomorrow is RIC Sunday in the Lutheran church, when nearly 400 congregations celebrate their participation in the Reconciling in Christ program of Lutherans Concerned/North America.

In preparing the prayers and liturgy, I began thinking of that verse from 1 Peter 3:15: “Always be ready to make your defense to anyone who demands from you an accounting for the hope that is in you.” People like that hatemonger Fred Phelps don’t “demand” that we account for our hope in God’s grace, they just judge us and tell us we’re “going to hell.” Of course that is as ignorant and arrogant as it is un-Christian. But how do we explain the hope that is within us—as LGBT Christians?

So I wrote this statement of faith yesterday, as an attempt at an essential summary for our own times of what it means to be a Christian: to confess absolute faith in Christ—not to state all the doctrines but to speak intentionally about what it means to follow where Jesus leads. I have called this “A Reconciling Creed.” It is deeply personal, but full of references to biblical passages about the faith.  (I suppose I should publish them too, possibly on danhooper.info.)

This Reconciling Creed is divided into four sections, not three, although the first three are entirely trinitarian. Many details about Christ’s incarnation are omitted, not because they are unimportant or unbelievable in our time, but because what is truly relevant for the life of faith is often overlooked in the ancient and many contemporary creeds. Here is the statement:

I believe that God created all that exists, and that humanity was created in God’s image, with a special mission to be stewards of this good creation, and to care for one another.  In God’s sight, I know that I am blessed—a unique and precious individual—and that my life has dignity and purpose.

For God so loved the world that Jesus Christ was sent to save the world, not to condemn it. I believe that he humbled himself, even to death upon the Cross.  He lay down his life so that I might be redeemed and my sins forgiven. All this comes from God’s goodness and grace alone—not by my efforts.  I know that through the waters of Baptism I have been made a member of Christ’s body, and marked forever by the sign of the cross.

And for our sake, the Holy Spirit has come to us as advocate, guide, and counselor.  With the guidance of the Spirit—as the Scriptures show—God has called us to lives of faith, not to earn God’s favor but in response to our redemption.  Christ has entrusted to us this community, his Church on earth, in which we live by one new commandment:  that we love one another as he loves us. And we are called to carry his message to everyone who will receive it:  God has reconciled all people for the sake of Christ, giving us peace, ending all hostility, and creating one new humanity.

I believe my life and my place in God’s household are gifts of grace, which we all receive through faith alone. I believe the kingdom of Christ, which is coming, will have no end. I know that, in this new heaven and new earth Christ is preparing room for me. There will be—for me and all who love him—a place at the table forever, where rejoicing will have no end.  Amen.

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Warm feeling: claim the love.

Friday, December 31st, 2010

A long-ago friend recently wrote to me by e-mail, and now we’ve reconnected too on Facebook. He mentioned the church where I was an intern—the Vicar—for one year. He has returned several times, but says he didn’t find “the warm feeling I had there years ago.”

Of course, years ago he was a teenager, in a faithful family of the church, and all of life’s adult challenges and problems had probably not exploded yet for him. I re-read his message several times tonight, and the words that snagged me each time were “the warm feeling I had there years ago.”

What is that “warm feeling”? And where did it go?

I am mindful these days (writing in this very last hour of 2010) how much the world keeps changing. I reflect on a lifetime of remaining faithful to the Christian church — the Lutheran church — even in those decades that I knew I wouldn’t be loved if they knew the real me. But I remained faithful because I believed that God was faithful with me and that was all that mattered.

But “the warm feeling” is so much the creation of culture and emotion, which both change, be fickle, or disappear in a New York minute. Over the years I have seen so many of my own contemporaries disappear from the church, or at least from making a commitment, because they didn’t experience or maybe didn’t even want a “warm feeling.” But I am happy to say that I’m seeing this again in our time. It’s a vastly different warm feeling than our families and our childhood/youth culture provided. It is more honest, more grounded, less religious but more spiritual. It has nothing to do with social conventionality, and everything to do with personal integrity and the search for values over sensations.

For me, I think a new “warm feeling” started the day I realized that— if there is a God— God knows me all the way through, and in fact knows all the secrets I was trying to hide from myself and others. The realization caused me brief terror (like “OH NO!!”) until I saw this awareness of God’s knowledge in the same frame as God’s love: I am known by God who is omniscient, as I really am, and yet God loves me. That’s what is so shocking and revolutionary — that, being known fully and deeply, we are still loved.

There is an old phrase in the “red book” (Service Book and Hymnal) that I grew up with, I think, maybe in the Confession of Sins, that said of God: “from whom no secrets are hid.” In psychological terms, this represents true intimacy — when my guard is down, my pretense is gone, my vulnerability is at the maximum, and yet I genuinely sense that I am loved.

Well, maybe it sounds like a lot of theoretical crap.  This goes back decades now, but I think about the time all of this was working through my mind/heart, I was also having many new conversations with troubled young gay people — who never had any “warm feeling” but instead felt “that sick feeling” of rejection and fear of judgment. And my heart went out to them.

I remember sitting up very late many different nights with people who were terrified and wanted to run, if not from God, from any expression of the church. The fear of exposure was a wall too high to tear down merely on the promise that love awaits us all on the other side. But deeply and consistently I heard the secret equivalent of a “Voice” saying to me: “It’s true. Trust this. Follow this. God loves you as you are. It’s okay to come out of hiding.” And so I did. And ever since I’ve keep encouraging others to do likewise. Come out of hiding. Claim the love that Jesus promised.

—Pastor Dan Hooper

Posted in "The Closet", Bible & Interpretation, Coming Out, Doctrine, Faith, LGBT Christian, Spirituality | No Comments »

Stop excusing cruelty.

Sunday, December 26th, 2010

Sometimes things just come to me – thoughts that won’t let me go until I have thought them through. This hit me hard on Christmas night.

Like a cup or bucket that cannot hold another drop with overflowing, or (more pertinent in Southern California) like a rain-saturated hillside that cannot take one more tenth of an inch of rainfall before it gives way to a mudslide, I have reached my lifetime saturation point on some things.

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One of them is cruelty. Whether it be cruelty to animals or children, or women—or cruelty to POWs, children and animals in Iraq (it just goes on and on), or the atrocities of Darfur, or bullying of gay-appearing teenagers, or all the genocides of the 20th century, some of which I have lived contemporaneously with and others were only lessons I learned as a student (the Jewish Holocaust had ended before I was born)— I am beyond wearying of cruelty.

These days I find myself not wanting to read a news headline if my cruelty meter begins to beep. Individual acts of psychopathic behavior or cruelty, or the utter madness of foreclosures upon the elderly and a marshal escorting someone from their own home because of missed payments, the bottom line is that our society still tolerates, if not legalizes, many forms of cruelty.

Like many other things, cruelty is concealed under different terms. Society accepts the unacceptable because it re-labels things to appear less odious, less inhuman, less cruel. When it comes to the tragic gay bullying of recent months that led to a wave of teen suicides, for example, how many of us heard “boys will be boys” as the standard excuse, a deflection of the evil. Braced as I was for the tragedy of it, I still got weepy watching a live production of The Laramie Project earlier this year in Pasadena, telling the chilling story of mixed reactions to the torture and murder of Matthew Shepard in1998. Cruelty is perpetrated by overpowering the weaker party. Masculinity is constantly measured and defined by the ancient contest to prove who has weakness, as if weakness then is justification for contest, for warfare, for cruelty.

When I was in college, our Drama Department produced “The Crucible” by Arthur Miller, a defining work that views the 17th century Salem witch trials through a moral lense. Although there was no visible violence, what took place in those trials was also cruelty, disguised and re-packed as religious righteousness, and the slowly-grinding wheels of justice to conceal fear and superstition. But like masculinity in another context, justice and righteousness cloak the redefinition of cruelty so that it seems somehow necessary in the service of a higher good.

Nonsense!

One can always explain evil things that happen, but explanations cannot excuse them. For one human being to condemn another to death, or to torture another to death, is cruelty. Cruel is defined as willfully or knowingly causing pain or distress to another. Wikipedia’s article on psychopathy and antisocial personality disorder is long and complex, but disturbing. For example, “Psychopaths lack a sense of guilt or remorse for any harm they may have caused others, instead rationalizing the behavior, blaming someone else, or denying it outright.”

I would love to talk this over with a mental health professional in terms of religious convictions. Is there a corporate psychopathology that is easily cloaked with religious rectitude?

Today is St. Stephen’s Day on the Christian calendar. St. Stephen of the Acts of the Apostles (6:8–7:60), the first martyr in fact for the name of Jesus. Stephen was cruelly stoned to death by an angry mob that took offense at his religious views.

It is probably not wise to make any comparisons of that act with the actions of Muslims who defend their faith by taking umbrage whenever the Prophet is demeaned in a cartoon, etc. Christians have perpetrated perhaps as much or more cruelty than others to defend what they suppose is “the Christian faith.” Think the Crusades, the Inquisition. Think of burning gay people alive at the stake. Think of a flawed moral theology, pushed onto the faithful, which expects them to tolerate and accept unbearable burdens.

For example, “God never expects us to bear burdens which we cannot bear,” according to an old saying. You can find various wordings of this cliche on Answer Bag. Such a cliche is just as much heresy as anything else ever said. It is not God who lays unbearable burdens on us, but other Christians who load those burdens, completely lacking a “sense of guilt or remorse for any harm they may have caused others, instead rationalizing the behavior, blaming someone else, or denying it outright.” There you have theological psychopathology.

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One thinks of that outrageous preacher from Topeka who preaches hatred at the front door of funerals. He thinks he is morally and theologically “right” as if that justifies cruelty and the complete absence of compassion. No wonder that “followers” of Jesus give him a bad name!

But Mr. Phelps is only the most publicly odious of the under-scum of our society which tolerates and excuses cruelty. It is time that decent people stop condoning hatred and cruelty no matter how it is labeled.

—Pastor Dan Hooper

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