"For the Bible Tells Me So": A few thoughts

Last night my wife and I watched For the Bible Tells Me So, a movie about the way that lots of branches of Christianity crush gays' sense of self and self-worth. It's a moving film that looks at the experiences of gay children of straight Christian parents. For those of you interested in this, I highly recommend it. I am going to offer some spoilers and a small critique.

Each of the stories is quite different:

• A gay black woman whose preacher father and very active mother have difficulty accepting her lesbianism but are able to get to some kind of reconciliation.
• Anglican bishop Eugene Robinson and his family's journey.
• A woman whose daughter was active in drama and singing in school, went to college and decided that she was gay, and then became totally alienated. The daughter, Anna, eventually committed suicide. It is heart-wrenching and a bit graphic with a picture of the suicide.
• Senator Dick Gephardt's daughter, Chrissy, who got married to a man and then divorced as she finally "woke up" to understand that she was gay (pictured above from the movie website's gallery).
• A teenage Minnesota boy whose parents were at first quite upset and read a great deal to learn about homosexuality. Some of what they read was by Focus on the Family founder James Dobson. At the film's end, they try to confront Dobson and are arrested.

Each story is both touching and instructive. Learning these families' journeys is both heart-wrenching and sometimes beautiful. My sister is gay, so I had much in common with the people I was watching, though we were always very accepting and open to my sister's sexuality. Today, she is happily married to her wife and they are a model for other couples. But I am reminded of all of the shame that was instilled in her by our culture, much of which comes from the kind totalitarian religion.

The movie goes to great pains to try to distance the "true" message of a semi-liberal or liberal Christianity from the "false" message of literalists/fundamentalists. Bishop Desmond Tutu, Harvard's Peter Gomes, Orthodox Rabbi Steve Greenberg and Reverend Jimmy Creech all discuss at length how literalists take things out of context and cherry pick from the Bible to support their homophobic agenda. They castigate the Falwells, Robertsons, and Dobsons of the world for decontextualizing the word "abomination" in the book of Leviticus 18. I concur. It's placed among verses that tell you not to eat shrimp and so on. Many of today's Christians are shrimp eaters...including the liberals. So why are they selective about what they follow and what they don't?

Let me say that I am certainly sympathetic to and seem to share the values of many of these liberal Christian thinkers. But when they say that the fundamentalists are cherry-picking verses and keeping this and throwing out that, they are engaged in a big act of hypocrisy. They are using non-divine information all the time to make logical and ethical judgments about an allegedly divine book. I really don't see why we should believe that the book is actually the written word of any God at all. There's a lot of this strange theological circumlocution in this movie and I find it socially pleasant and ethically more responsible insofar as it encourages compassion and understanding. But it is also logically appalling. It's so many intellectual gymnastics moves - it's a lot of elaborate and difficult thinking that gets us to a conclusion we like with false thinking and justification of a culturally authoritative book. It just reinforced my already pretty sturdy belief that theology is just a dressed-up version of fantasy literature theory and criticism.

I recommend this movie for its insight and hope for a more compassionate world. It is also a fantastic critique of Christianity by Christians so those of you who are religious might find it useful. The unbelievers among us are invited to see a panoply of views and feelings. I, for one, was a bit more hopeful at the movie's end.