The Tipping Point

I sometimes get the feeling from people on the “love the sinner-hate the sin” side of the sexuality discussion in our church that they take us of the opposing view to be people who, when confronted with our own same-sex attraction, simply chucked all the church’s teaching in the interest of getting laid.

I suspect that such a convenient switch in thinking is rare. Those of us commenting in this group know the process to be arduous and ongoing. But, though none of us have made an easy and quick transition to gay acceptance, I do recognize in myself and others a kind of “tipping point”: that moment of revolution in the mind and heart when it becomes clear to you that being gay isn’t an inherently sinful state, that same-sex relationships aren’t necessarily sinful, and that such relationships aren’t necessarily a turning away from the path to God.

I believe this tipping point arises out of the process by which the church’s traditional teaching meets the honest examination of one’s own experience—two things whose meeting is most worthy of being taken very seriously . I might relate it to the process that happens when those who have been taught that the creation account in Genesis is literally true in every detail are confronted by the facts of science. There’s a struggle. Maybe they even go through a process similar to Dr. Kubler-Ross’s stages of grief (denial-anger-bargaining-depression-acceptance), but they come through to a place where they realize that the non-literal approach does nothing whatever to diminish the power of their faith. Even if their process causes them to go back to the view they originally held, they’ve still had to come to the tipping point and make a decision.

Those of us who have come to believe that our homosexuality is not necessarily something that sets us in a direction other than God’s have mostly come to the tipping point after a lengthy process of thought and prayer, having come to that place where what we’ve been taught comes up against what we’ve experienced. It has to be acknowledged that, for us today, our own intuition about sexuality is also supported by large amounts of new data that indicate homosexuality is neither pathological nor quantifiably harmful, as well as by the growing openness of other gay people.

There’s also a tipping point for our heterosexual friends who move toward gay acceptance, and that tipping point these days is almost always brought about by knowing someone gay. One of the posters to this group made an interesting observation last week to the effect that her real change of heart toward gay people happened mostly after she’d met some in “real” life, outside the church context. The few gay people she’d been conscious of growing up in the church didn’t challenge her perception of the church’s teaching that homosexuality is disordered. What did it was her interactions with gay colleagues at work: “It really challenged the idea that homosexuality per se that was the source of the disorder I’d observed,” she says. “When you know two or three or four gay people who are among the half-dozen most balanced, sane, compassionate, well-adjusted, and just plain decent people you’ve known in your life, well, it’s just damn hard to see homosexuality as a source of fundamental imbalance.”

This seemed to me a key observation about why things are so difficult in the church, and why the “tipping point” toward even looking at gays as non-disordered is reached so less often by hierarchs, clergy, and theologians than it is by laypeople: Those whose lives are spent primarily in church circles inhabit an artificial environment where well-adjusted gay people are relatively rare.

Gay people are generally pressured out of the church one way or another, whether they leave of their own accord or are excommunicated by their priest or bishop. Among those who are able to remain, a high number are indeed conflicted. This makes it even easier for clergy to regard all gays as disordered, because that’s mostly what they see. Thus, clergy are free to regard us as wounded, truncated, and by our nature prone to out-of-control promiscuity and degradation. Many of us in this group are surely familiar with the experience of being forced into that identity by clergy, even by the ones making an effort at compassion. They seem to find some comfort in identifying us as some sort of fearsome or pitiable “other.”

Thus, sad to say, one of the main ways clergy are confronted with the humanity and good will of a gay person is when a child of their own turns out to be gay. This has been happening, of course, and will of course happen more in the future, as the structure of support for gays outside the church allows such children to speak out about themselves without fear. It’s sad that this is what it takes for a lot of clergy to make it to the tipping point, but it’s a particularly powerful way to be brought there. And we can bet it’s going to be happening more and more in the future.

Personally, I’m guardedly pessimistic about the future of gay people in the Orthodox church. Even in the United States, where acceptance is more of a possibility than it is in other parts of the world, a fundamentalist mind seems to be arising more and more. We may very well all end up categorically excommunicated. But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t remain there in the church as long as we can, praying, repenting, and in humility bearing witness to the truth as we’ve come to understand it. We owe it to our brothers and sisters to do so. Such an effort is always the right thing to do; such an effort is never wasted. If we do that, I am convinced that, somewhere down the line, some priest, when confronted by the humanity of a gay person in his own child, will be taken to the tipping point by that encounter. And when that happens, he’ll remember us too, as he reconsiders.