J. E. Sumerau - Christianity and the Limits of Minority Acceptance in America: God Loves (Almost) Everyone

Recent Titles in the Series

Christianity and the Limits of Minority Acceptance in America: God Loves (Almost) Everyone, by J. E. Sumerau and Ryan T. Cragun

LEXINGTON BOOKS

Lanham Boulder New York London

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Available

ISBN 978-1-4985-6299-7 (cloth : alk. paper)

ISBN 978-1-4985-6300-0 (electronic)

TM The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.

Printed in the United States of America

What God Has Joined Together: Gender, Sexual, and Religious Intersections in America

Allison She was actively involved in her youth group, cultivated her personal relationship with Jesus, and even participated in missionary work and choir performances on occasion. As she told the first author over coffee one day in 2014, she was the perfect Christian, completely devoted to all of it until I came out as transgender in my senior year of high school and all the people who talked about love and acceptance in Jesus turned their backs on me. At the time, about ten years before meeting the first author at an academic conference, Allison began two interrelated transitionsfrom Christian to her current identification as spiritual but not religious and from a male body that never fit to the beautiful woman she is today and, as she put it, always has been. As she put it, I realized after all those years, all that really mattered to those people was conformity and that I was more interested in Jesus.

Like Allison, Brian left the church he was raised in after high school. Sitting in a Chicago bar with the first author in 2013, he recalled: I grew up hearing all about evil homosexuality, and I figured that bisexuality wouldnt be any less evil to those people so I left hoping to find a better place that was more about faith than sex. At first, Brian went to one of the many churches that have begun to welcome gay and lesbian people, but they seemed to have trouble understanding bisexuality even if they were okay with the gay part of it. He later tried out the Metropolitan Community Church, a religion created specifically for sexual and gender minorities, and that was better, but I still ran into gay and lesbian Christians who didnt believe in bisexuality so it was only a little better. As he put it, these days I just go to services here and there, but I dont really feel like any of the churches really accept people like me that much. So, I dont have much of a community and I miss that.

Unlike Allison and Brian, Megan still attends the church of her youth even though, as she puts it, they dont really accept my husband and I so we dont really talk about our personal life much with them anymore. Megan and her husband Rick are a non-monogamous couple who, after seven years of marriage, began enjoying dating other people outside of their marriage while continuing to develop and enjoy their own life partnership sexually, emotionally, romantically, and spiritually. As Megan put it, Were kind of like most of the people in the Bible if you think about it. We just both have other lovers instead of only Rick getting to have fun. Rather than embracing thisarguably most traditional of Judeo-Christian marriages based on the Old Testamenther friends at church reacted negatively and began to distance themselves from her when they learned about the poly nature of her marriage at a Bible study on relationships in 2010.

While Allison, Brian, and Megan have remained at least somewhat religious in the face of struggles with other religious people, Thomas is no longer religious in practice or belief. Like the others, however, he grew up in a religious household and faced tensionsthough not rejectionfrom the family and the church when he came out as gay in 2012. As he put it, They didnt like it, but they kind of took the love the sinner; hate the sin approach, and tried to be supportive in their own way, which was better than many of us get, I guess. Although sexual nonconformity did not create the same level of tension or rejection faced by Allison, Brian, and Megan, he was later All but disowned by his family for coming out as an atheist as well. As he put it, Theyre getting used to the gay thing, but the atheist thing was, I dont know, a bridge too far.

What do we make of these four stories at the current moment in American sexual, gender, and religious history? On the one hand, these stories may be surprising amid political and religious rhetoric celebrating shifting Christian and social attitudes concerning homosexuality, same-sex marriage, and same-sex adoption. Everywhere we look in contemporary American media, there are examples of progress, claims of accomplishing marriage equality, and stories of more and more religious groups, governmental authorities, and even media formats welcoming gay and lesbian people they spent the past century demonizing, excluding, and attacking.

A good illustration of these shifting attitudes can be seen in survey data. Over the last twenty years, attitudes toward same-sex marriage have changed dramatically. Though homosexual is not a term gay and lesbian people use much in their own social and political lives at present, we use it here to illustrate the exact wording of survey questions on the topics of interest. We use the preferred terms