A Life of Unlearning (3rd edition) - a preachers struggle with his homosexuality, church and faith (original) (raw)
Related papers
Sensoria: A Journal of Mind, Brain & Culture, 2015
Societies where ignorance and misinformation about sexuality and gender identity abounds have been breeding grounds for much harm to lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) individuals and to the community as a whole. Within the context of the Christian faith, the greatest harm has occurred to those LGBT individuals who have submitted themselves to exgay / reparative / conversion 'therapies' (i.e., SOCE; Sexual Orientation Change Efforts) and organisations. The practice of seeking to turn homosexual to heterosexual has predominately existed within Christianity, but not exclusively. Programs have operated and still exist in association with Jewish1, and more recently Islamic2 religious communities. This article is a personal account from a former evangelist that details the ‘life cycle’ of SOCEs in Australia and the author’s
Negotiating a Religious Identity: The Case of the Gay Evangelical
Sociological Analysis, 1991
This article examines the process by which persons reconstruct their Evangelical religious identity to include the formerly incongruent homosexual identity. Members of one conservative gay Christian organization, called Good News, are profiled in the way they come to desire, construct, and solidify a gay Evangelical identity. Through a process of socialization, they renegotiate the boundaries and definitions of their religious identity to include a positive valuation of homosexuality. This accommodated, but still distinctively Evangelical, identity enables persons to resolve the dissonance between their Christian beliefs and their homosexual feelings. The case study explores how a religious identity is accommodated to incorporate incompatible aspects of the self. It provides an interesting glimpse at religious socialization outside of radical conversion. This somewhat unique example offers a look at how individuals and groups are involved in negotiating religious identities in a modern world.
Using person-centred ethnography and narrative analysis, this work provides an account of how 16 same-sex attracted Christian men retrospectively constructed experiences of sexual-moral crisis and healing. The first of its kind to explore such experiences in their entirety and reflect on the relationships between various successes, failures, events, and encounters therein, it outlines a shared narrative structure composed of: 1) early experiences of anomie and difference, 2) the unmaking of self and world with the emergence of same-sex attraction, 3) a phase of personal disintegration and ineffective coping, 4) the quest for new possibilities and engagement with various remedial institutions, 5) personal commitment to particular redressive strategies, 6) experiences of healing; and 7) the call to performance and service in the wake of crisis. The author argues that sexual-moral crisis cannot be solely attributed to religiosity nor resolved through evasive strategies of self-bifurcation and denial. Rather, overcoming this conflict requires a reconstruction of self and world capable of restoring personal integrity and bringing the spiritual, moral, and sexual selves into harmonious alignment. This task is primarily social and entails the appropriation of public symbolic devices – explanatory models, plots, and metaphors - to reconfigure one’s experience of self and world. The author outlines three distinct figures that emerge from this transformative process: the sexual ascetic, the ex-gay man, and the gay survivor. Each is associated with a distinct understanding of self and embodies a unique sexual, moral, social, and spiritual existence. Drawing on theories of reading, the author argues that these divergent approaches reflect four considerations: the persuasiveness of the remedial discourse, its relevance to subjective experience, its socio-political acceptability, and its perceived therapeutic efficacy. Ultimately, participants in all three groups described remarkably similar experiences of healing and characterize their current lives as highly satisfying despite complex experiences of growth, loss, and continued struggle. The work effectively eschews binary approaches to sexual orientation and encourages the reader to recognize a diverse array of sexualities, spiritualties, moralities, and selves present in contemporary North American society. Implications for policy development, ethical debate, and psychological practice are discussed.
Practical Theology, 2017
This article garners theo-pastoral lessons from the lived realities of gay, HIVpositive Christian men in Singapore. Such lessons are premised on the belief that gay HIV-positive men are prophets with lessons of life and faith for Christian communities, rather than polluted victims of a disease who simply merit pastoral assistance. The analysis of the narratives of three gay, HIV-positive Christian men through a Constructivist Grounded Theory Methodology is assisted by Erlinda N. Senturias' notion of People Living with HIV and AIDs as bearing God's mission for human wholeness. It explains that these men see the intersection of their sexuality, serostatus, and faith as invitations to collaborate in the unfolding of God's plan in their lives, and to form a greater appreciation for their physical bodies and loved ones. keywords gay men, HIV, queer theology, sexuality, Singapore This article aims to glean theo-pastoral lessons from gay, HIV-positive Christian men in Singapore. In the context of this present work, my use of the term 'theopastoral lessons' is predicated on the belief that gay HIV-positive men ought not to be considered as culpable, unfortunate, and passive victims of a disease who warrant compassionate pastoral assistance, but instead, as I will clarify in the course of this article, as prophets with practical lessons of faith and life for Christian communities. Hence, my proposal is that Christian communities remove the suspicion, fear, and misunderstanding that they may have long harboured against gay and HIV-positive people, and learn from their lived experiences. To do so is to embrace radical love, which Cheng (2011) describes as 'a love so extreme that it dissolves …