The intersection of religion with human sexuality has always been fraught with conflict. And no single topic has generated more controversy and more headlines in the past year than homosexuality (except, perhaps, the continuing news about the Catholic priest sex scandal, see sidebar). The consecration last fall of the openly gay Gene Robinson as bishop of New Hampshire triggered an ongoing threat to the future of the Episcopal Church in the U.S. and its relationship to the worldwide Anglican Communion, and caused Christian denominations and other faith expressions to clearly define their stance on gay clergy specifically and homosexuality generally.
Not surprisingly, that controversy has provided a fair amount of fodder for authors and publishers, as well as a challenge for booksellers. The Episcopal Booksellers Association met that challenge head-on last fall by creating a bibliography of books on homosexuality to help bookstore owners assist customers. Backlist titles on gay issues began selling again at association president Nancy Marshall's store. "Our books about the church itself also started selling at a rate we had not seen before," says Marshall, who owns the Episcopal Bookstore in Seattle with her husband, John. "People were asking, 'What does my church stand for? Tell me more about this church.' They wanted answers."
Not So Conservative
That desire for answers extends far beyond the Episcopal Church, the epicenter of the past year's tumultuous debate over gay clergy. Recently, it extended to the Orthodox rabbinate—hardly a group that most people would equate with liberal thought on any issue—with the publication of Rabbi Steve Greenberg's Wrestling with God and Men: Homosexuality in the Jewish Tradition (Univ. of Wisconsin, Mar.).
"There's an assumption that Orthodox Jews are fundamentalists or literalists," says Greenberg, who came out publicly in 1999. "But the more one is committed to studying the debate and the differences of opinion in thousands of years of Jewish life, the more you learn that there is not one divine intention in the verses [of scripture]. Jewish study becomes a matter of teasing out the many divine intentions that inhabit the verses."
Greenberg began writing the semi-autobiographical book a decade ago, when he says he was "deep within the closet," as a way of confronting his own sexual orientation and attempting to reconcile it with his faith tradition. By his own admission, Greenberg spent a great deal of time "trembling before God" before reaching a personal resolution on the matter. "For religious organizations to truly grasp what is at stake, they need to hear the testimonies of people who say the condemning verses have crippled their emotional development, denied them a place at the table in their churches and synagogues, and exiled them in shame. Only then does the potential for answers truly emerge."
Wisconsin senior humanities acquisitions editor Raphael Kadushin sees Greenberg's book as a major contribution to the discussion of gays in religious leadership because it focuses on the Jewish tradition, which he calls the "root of Western theology.... When you examine those roots, you see things are much more flexible than the fundamentalists claim. Americans are mostly hearing one side of the debate, and it's a side that reduces complex religious tradition to something dumbed-down and simplistic," says Kadushin, whose travels underscore the differences in European and American attitudes toward homosexuality. "Europe is where America will be 50 years from now, if we're lucky," he says.
Evangelicals and the Gay Debate
What Kadushin calls fundamentalist thought could readily apply to evangelical Christian attitudes as well, though even there the landscape is changing, if slowly. Prolific—and often controversial—evangelical author Tony Campolo weighs in on the issue in his upcoming Speaking My Mind (W Publishing, July). Stopping short of sanctioning gay marriage, Campolo urges churches to allow homosexuals full participation in their congregational life and to offer support groups for gays and lesbians.
Harvest House author and former homosexual Joe Dallas takes the debate to a more personal level in his June release, When Homosexuality Hit Home: What to Do and What Not to Do, designed to help evangelicals make decisions that will affirm their love for a gay family member without violating their own conscience.
"The noise level is so high right now that opposing sides have trouble hearing each other," Dallas says. "The result is that gays misunderstand the reasons for our objection to homosexuality, and they accuse us of spreading hatred and violence toward gays. I don't believe that's true, but I am probably more critical of conservative Christians than I am of gays. I tried to provide valid points that family members can make without dismissing a gay loved one as a reprobate."
Another summer release from Harvest House is 101 Frequently Asked Questions About Homosexuality (June) by Mike Haley, also a former homosexual. The two upcoming nonfiction titles join an extensive backlist of gay-related titles as well as several novels, including an April release, Bette Nordberg's A Season of Grace, in which the female protagonist learns that her twin brother is dying of AIDS-related complications resulting from a homosexual relationship.
"Before I came to Harvest House, I spent 20-plus years in Christian retail, behind the counter ordering books, knowing what was available and what wasn't. When I had customers come in who were facing this [the homosexual] issue, there wasn't much to give them," says editor Nick Harrison, who credits Harvest House with giving him the freedom to pursue more books on the topic. "A lot more has become available since then. Christian publishers are gingerly trying to find books that present a balanced and compassionate view as well as provide some clear answers."
Perhaps because the less-compassionate voices in the evangelical camp are shouting the loudest, gays tend to be wary of evangelicals' open arms, which Campolo would no doubt describe as pretty shaky. The evangelical mantra regarding homosexuality, "Love the sinner; hate the sin," takes a beating in Love the Sin: Sexual Regulation and the Limits of Religious Tolerance (Beacon Press, Apr.) by Janet R. Jakobsen and Ann Pellegrini. To the authors, intolerance toward gays is tantamount to a violation of religious freedom and the separation of church and state, since laws against gay marriage can be traced to biblical verses interpreted as injunctions against homosexual relationships. Even so, "tolerance," they say, is not the goal, as that word implies an "us" versus "them" mentality. Only complete freedom—both sexual and religious—can be considered acceptable, they write.
To Be Gay and Liturgical
Among liturgical churches, no two are further apart on the issue of gay clergy than the Episcopal Church and the Roman Catholic Church. The divide between the two churches on the issue of clergy in general is embodied in the person of Tracey Lind, not only a female priest but also a lesbian. Lind, dean of Trinity Cathedral in Cleveland, Ohio, is also the author of Interrupted by God: Glimpses from the Edge (Oct.), a book endorsed by Bishop John Spong, who is controversial even among Episcopalians, and published by Pilgrim Press, the trade imprint of the mainline United Church of Christ.
"Not everyone in this denomination likes the more liberal books we do," says Pilgrim consulting editor Ulrike Guthrie. "We have a lot of latitude in the views our authors express. We want to provide a forum for people to consider 'what if?' questions. We invite them to suspend their conclusions and play with the alternatives, even if they end up in the same place where they started."
One of the publisher's most talked-about recent books is Marvin Ellison's Same-Sex Marriage? A Christian Ethical Analysis (Jan.), which started out as an essay that enabled the author—a gay man who was once married but is now excluded from marrying—to sort out his own thinking on the issue. "I discovered this is a much larger issue than one you can set aside with a simple yes or no," says Ellison, who took a year-long sabbatical from his teaching position at Bangor Theological Seminary in Maine to study the debate on the question. "One of the things I learned is that marriage is an ever-changing institution. We now recognize women as equal partners and support the right of interracial couples to marry, which wasn't always the case."
On the Catholic side of the homosexuality debate, Dugan McGinley's Acts of Faith, Acts of Love: Gay Catholic Autobiographies as Sacred Texts (Continuum, Apr.) complies the writings of 40 men who describe what it's like to be gay in a church that fails to focus on the subjective experiences of those who identify themselves as Catholic—or ex-Catholic. In addition to their stories, McGinley offers an analysis of the church's theology of homosexuality and its effects on gay Catholics.
Through nine essays on what it means to be gay and Catholic, in On Being Liked (Crossroad, Apr.) James Alison maintains that "the really interesting theological questions surrounding the gay issue are not the arguments concerning being gay, but rather the ways in which the gay and lesbian discovery of being Catholic... helps all of us develop a richer sense of the kingdom of God... and the splendor of the Church which is that kingdom's sign," he writes in the introduction.
LGBT and World Religions
Haworth Press ventures outside the confines of the Judeo-Christian world with two titles that provide a detailed look at homosexual attitudes and practices in other traditions. Queering Creole Spiritual Traditions (May) traces the roots of homosexuality among certain expressions of faith in the Americas back to spiritual traditions in Africa that involved same-sex intimacy and were largely accepted by the societies in which they flourished. Author Randy P. Conner and co-writer David Hatfield Sparks collaborated on the research, writing, and interviews for the book, which is subtitled Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Participation in African-Inspired Traditions in the Americas —traditions such as Santeria and voodoo, among others.
Finally, an upcoming fall release from Haworth, Ronald E. Long's Men, Homosexuality, and the Gods, explores the religious significance of homosexuality in historical and contemporary perspective throughout the world. Long's diverse topics include the Sambians of Papua New Guinea, Taoists of ancient China, Islamic Sufism, the Hebrew Scriptures, the writings of Paul and St. Augustine and the relationship between enlightenment and homosexuality in Japanese and Tibetan Buddhism.
"The relationship between God and gay and lesbian people has been so much colored by Western and fundamental Christian bias that we are very excited to present some alternative views in these books," says Haworth v-p and publications director Bill Palmer. Still, Palmer believes there's a noticeable gap in the ever-expanding list of books addressing homosexual religious issues.
"No one has ever told the story of the contributions of gay people to organized religion in the West," Palmer says, noting that making those contributions required homosexuals to hide their sexual orientation. "Gay people have made a huge contribution, especially in aesthetic areas like music and liturgy, all to the glory of God. But they were often living very pained lives. Theirs is an untold and under-appreciated story."n
