This is a true story.
There was this
failed art student whose only real previous job had been as a corporal in the
army. During tough economic times he began hanging around in bars where
unemployed guys congregated to drown their sorrows. The guy found that these
men were desperate enough to grasp on to just about any explanation for the
sorry state of their country. After a couple of years of this the guy convinced
himself that he had enough followers to take over the government in the
mid-sized southern city in which he lived. He got his drinking buddies fired up
and they marched on city hall, only to be quickly dispersed by the police. The
guy was arrested and thrown in jail for treason for a couple of years. While he
was there, he had nothing better to do than write down his crazy ranting
philosophy in a book that was virtually unreadable. When they let him out of
jail, the guy picked up where he had left off. Incredibly, the guy was able to
progressively expand his band of followers from the little southern city until
it became a major, though minority, force in the country. He never actually won
an election, but he didn't need to. By the time the majority of the country realized
what the guy was really up to, it was too late to stop him. It only took him
eight years to take over the entire country. He got lots of people killed.
It is obvious
of course that the guy was Hitler, the country was Germany, the unreadable book
was Mein Kampf, the southern city was Munich and the guy's followers became the
NAZI party. What is less obvious was Hitler's crazy ranting philosophy, which
was actually based upon a sociological theory called Eugenics. Hitler contended
the German people (the "Volk") were intended by a mystical presence
(not the God we know, because the NAZI party was strictly atheist) to be
"pure", and that certain impure strains introduced into the Volk had
weakened it and left it vulnerable to foreign enemies--thus, Germany's defeat
in WWI. Only by purification of the Volk would Germany be able to reclaim its
intended place atop of the heap of humanity. History tends to focus on the Jews
as Hitler's prime "impurity" but he was equally vigilant in his calls
to eradicate gypsies, the handicapped and homosexuals. Again, it was not
scripture to which Hitler turned to justify this, it was the Eugenics based
idea that the Volk could be made pure by removing these biological mistakes
from the gene pool.
Crazy stuff
yeah, but he was talking to a bunch of unemployed drunks who had just had the
stuffing knocked out of them in WWI. Munich was a relative cow town compared to
Berlin, which was cosmopolitan and very disdainful of Hitler. To Berliners,
Hitler was a yokel from Austria who had managed to capture the simple minds of
a bunch of mouth-breathers. Berlin had a sizable homosexual population that
lived openly and was very active in Berlin's thriving arts and entertainment
industry. Berliners were tolerant. So tolerant that they did not effectively
speak out against Hitler or his deadly theories when he was still weak enough
to have been stopped. Nor did the majority of the German church, or the
Vatican. Although they surely disagreed with Eugenics and the godless
post-modern intellectual cesspool from which it had crawled they tolerated
Hitler and his misguided but deadly notions. In a sense, Germany and Europe
(perhaps exhausted from the first world war) was a moral vacuum into which
anything could rush in and grow. It seems odd in retrospect, but no organized
voice of religious authority rose up to pronounce Hitler's persecution of
homosexuals as a sin. Without a voice of moral authority upon which they could
rely, it really should not be a surprise that the average German was willing to
tolerate Hitler and his policies as well.
Today we are
faced with another dispute over homosexuality. This time, it is not their
demonization and persecution that is at issue, but whether the practice itself
in the form of a marriage should be elevated legally and morally to that of
heterosexual marriage. For some reason, this dispute is being adjudicated
through the political process with very little input from the organized church.
Some denominations (e.g., Catholic) are in opposition because (they assert)
homosexuality is a sin. It, the argument goes, is something unholy in the eyes
of God and thus the church cannot tolerate it. And, because Christians are
called to seek conformity between God's law and the secular code, these
opposing denominations actively oppose any law that recasts the marital
relation to encompass anything other than between a man and a woman. In short,
these opposing denominations refuse to tolerate homosexuality. They are
intolerant because, they say, the practice itself is sinful.
What then is
the countervailing argument in favor of homosexuality? It seems to me that it
would have to be that homosexuality is NOT a sin; that any scriptural evidence
that seemed to so indicate is either flawed in the transmission or the
transcription. Thus, it not being a sin, same-gender sexual relations are as
much a blessing as cross-gender sexual relations. As such, they are holy and
should be celebrated, not simply tolerated. In fact, it seems to me, that a
church that so believed would not be able to tolerate a parishioner that
believed otherwise. Just as some churches (very few) were intolerant of the
NAZIs, churches that believe homosexuality is holy should be intolerant of
those who disagree. These churches would have to take a strong public stand in
favor of homosexuality and advocate passionately in favor of its practice.
Anything less would be amoral.
Which is why I
am bum-fuddled by the great majority of American Christendom. It, including my
Episcopalian denomination, has not stated a position either way. Instead of
making the difficult decision to stand up to a premise with which it seems to
disagree (that homosexuality is a sin) and preaching from the pulpit that a
refusal to acknowledge a homosexual couple as fully within God's grace is
itself a sin, my church (as many do) preaches tolerance of both viewpoints. At best, this is illogical. At worst, it
is a feckless abdication of the church's duty to interpret God's ordinances and
speak them with assurance to a flock in need of the truth. To me, for a church
to say that the issue is so nuanced, or complicated or personal that the best
they can do is to contend that two clearly and mutually exclusive positions
should be tolerated is not acceptable. The people are there to hear the
church's best human-limited understanding of God's word. To give less is to
allow to fester a cesspool of amorality from which any weed of untruth can
spring, flourish and choke out the truth. It renders the church inoperative as
a voice of moral authority. In its most extreme, such fecklessness led directly
to the extermination of homosexuals in Hitler's concentration camps.
This dance of
tolerance has deadly consequences. It needs to stop.
