sexual orientation

Goodbye, InterVarsity

/ Liz / Leave a comment

This piece originally appeared on The Salt Collective, a now-defunct online magazine about culture, faith, and politics.

I arrived at the University of Michigan in the fall of 2000 as a naïve, eager 17-year-old. I spent my first week on campus doing the standard litany of Welcome Week activities: getting as much free food as possible from all the student organizations hosting events, traveling everywhere in a pack of te, going to see if fraternity parties lived up to the hype. College was the best.

And then classes started, and I quickly learned that college was not the best. College was a lot of work. More importantly, college could be incredibly lonely, especially for a new freshman. I had plenty of friends on campus from high school and my home church, but they were all busy doing their own thing, taking their own classes, starting their own lives. I was meeting tons of new people, but you could only go so deep in a few weeks. I’ve never enjoyed drinking, which ruled out a significant amount of weekend activity. I remember climbing into my lofted bed on a Saturday night in September and listening to the sounds of people walking and laughing outside my window, heading south on State Street toward Sigma Chi; I pulled the covers to my chin, folded my hands on my chest, and blinked into the dark. I had never felt more alone.

The first six weeks of college were hard. But then a remarkable thing happened: I went to a dinner hosted by Chinese Christian Fellowship (now Asian InterVarsity), one of the three InterVarsity chapters on campus. I’d been attending their weekly events, trying to figure out how I fit into this mass of people with whom I had at least two things in common, but nothing had really clicked. On this particular evening, though, a junior named Kelly invited me to sit with her and a handful of other freshmen I had never seen before. We clicked. These girls became my small group and my closest friends on campus. They were the ones who turned college around for me.

CCF became my spiritual home on campus. Though I would eventually roll in a lot of different circles, CCF was the hub, the center to which I always returned. My CCF friends were the ones who consoled me after breakups and with whom I had deep conversations about meaning and purpose; the ones with whom I went karaoking, drove to Canada to get dim sum, went up north at the end of every school year; the ones with whom I sat in dazed silence in Couzens Hall on the afternoon of 9/11. And not only did I love my CCF friends, I loved what InterVarsity stood for. A week-long training on racial reconciliation opened my eyes to the reality of systemic inequality and completely transformed my understanding of race and justice. There were campus fellowships you could join if you just wanted to have a lot of fun, and others if you wanted intense emotional experiences, but IV prided itself on being the one that encouraged you to intellectually engage with the campus and the world around you. IV wanted you to think, and for someone who was just starting to see how interesting and complicated and beautiful and terrible the world is, it was a great place to be.

InterVarsity’s impact on me didn’t end after college: My old staff worker helped me get me my first job after grad school. When I moved to the San Francisco Bay Area, I befriended a number of IV staff, some of whom contacted me out of the blue, because of what we had in common: Our commitment to racial and social justice was deeply rooted in our Christian convictions. I had never seen Christians so deeply committed to advocacy and activism, nor have I met any since. And though I had diverged theologically from IV on a number of issues since college, I was proud that it was one of very few evangelical organizations to affirm Black Lives Matter and that many of the people at the forefront of the BLM movement in the Bay Area were IV staff. These folks were the real deal.

And then it all came to a screeching halt.

***

Last week, Time reported that InterVarsity is asking all of its employees that do not accept a traditional view of human sexuality, as outlined in a position paper, to resign. Staff members who express disagreement and do not voluntarily resign will be terminated.

I first caught wind of this news last year from a friend on staff, Susan*, who told me how IV was circling the wagons on the issue of sexuality and her days with the organization were probably numbered as a result. Around the same time, the child of another IV friend, Ginny, began the process of coming out as transgender. On top of all of the personal ramifications of this transition, Ginny had to worry about whether her willingness to accept it would cost her her job, especially in light of these circling wagons. She ended up keeping her job, at least for the time being; her higher-ups told her that they would treat her child’s transition as though it were a behavioral issue and not penalize her for it. The reprieve was short-lived, though. In July of this year, IV’s interim president and president-elect emailed supervisors to notify them about the implementation of the new policy:

intervarsity-staff-directors-email

intervarsity-staff-directors-email-2intervarsity-staff-directors-email-3

Ginny was fired in September, one of three staff workers from UC Berkeley that have resigned or been terminated since the start of the school year as the result of IV’s ultimatum. Susan, who is still with the organization, tells me that more resignation letters from Bay Area staff are coming, and her own is likely among them.

***

The shocking part of this story is not InterVarsity’s view of sexuality. Progressive as it may be in some respects, at the end of the day, IV is still an evangelical organization. The shocking part is their decision to expel all employees who disagree. Jonathan Merritt, in an excellent piece for The Atlantic, aptly summarized the situation: “It is not extreme to hold the conservative Christian position on marriage and sexuality. But it is extreme to think that those who don’t, but are otherwise committed to your mission, should be fired.”

IV’s move is especially surprising to me for several reasons. First of all, InterVarsity views itself as a missions organization with the aim of reaching students for Jesus. The decision to force out supporters of a marginalized group is completely counterproductive to that mission. Throughout the gospels, we see Jesus choosing to hang with prostitutes, tax collectors — people ostracized and viewed as sinful by the religious establishment. If Jesus were around today, I am 99% sure that he would be kicking it with LGBT folks. But instead of choosing Jesus’s MO, InterVarsity has chosen to side with the Pharisee and condemn those who fully embrace the marginalized. Not a good look for an organization trying to encourage discipleship and Christlikeness.

Second, as I alluded to earlier, InterVarsity has always prided itself on being the thinking Christian’s fellowship. Multiple perspectives are welcomed and valued (at least aspirationally, if not always in practice); this is especially evident in the organization’s emphasis on racial reconciliation. So the fact that IV would choose to fire all of its employees who do not hold a particular belief — one that is well outside the bounds of its doctrinal statement, and one that is widely contested — is astounding to me. It’s a surprisingly totalitarian move from an organization that claims to celebrate a diversity of opinion.

And then there’s the selective application of the stances in their position paper. The document also says that divorce is sinful, but divorced people are not being asked to voluntarily resign. And if they’re asking anyone who supports LGBT relationships to leave, then anyone who’s attended the wedding of a previously divorced person should also be asked the same. But no, apparently that’s all fine; it’s only disagreement on this specific part of the paper that merits termination. (The paper itself is also confounding at several points. For example, in the discussion on sexual identity, it claims that “sex is not the ‘big deal’ that our society has made it to be” — yet sexuality is the only issue that has ever warranted a staff-wide purge in IV’s 75-year history.)

And then there are all the practical debacles. InterVarsity didn’t have to reaffirm its stance on this issue, and even if they did, they didn’t need to fire everyone who disagreed. They could have required affirmation of their position from new hires while keeping their existing employees who are doing good and fruitful work. But they chose to take these steps anyway, and they’ve invited a ton of terrible PR in the process. Divestment campaigns are underway. Conversations have started about beginning a new campus organization that welcomes students of all sexual orientations. And in this day and age, what 18-year-old wants to be a part of an organization that is so hostile not just to LGBT folks — i.e., their hallmates, their friends, their siblings — but also those who affirm them? I wouldn’t. So in one swift move, IV has successfully terminated good employees, alienated donors, opened the door for competition, and put off the very students that they exist to reach. From an organizational standpoint, this decision is baffling.

***

After posting the Time article on Facebook, several of my staff friends from other parts of the country were quick to reach out. One told me that she has people on her team who disagree with IV’s stance, but none of them are being terminated or resigning. The process seems to be playing out differently in the Bay Area than elsewhere, several said. But these reassurances are empty; it does not make me feel better to know that some stealthy LGBT-affirming staff are staying on elsewhere because they or their supervisors are keeping their mouths shut. It doesn’t change the fact that the organization has chosen to take these actions, and it does nothing to help LGBT students, because these staff workers need to keep their positions quiet in order to keep their jobs. I don’t understand how this don’t-ask-don’t-tell situation is supposed to be satisfying to anyone — least of all the higher-ups, who, in their email, sound pretty keen on smoking out dissenting voices.

I’d like to think that so many more staff people in the Bay Area are leaving because they have more integrity. That may or may not be true, but a more likely reason is that the issue is just more salient here than it is elsewhere. Bay Area staff workers work daily with queer students and queer leaders. It’s easy to keep your mouth shut on this issue when you lead a chapter in the Midwest or the South, where social stigma is more likely to keep students closeted. It’s much harder to do that when you work with out students every day. The dissonance between the organization’s stance and your reality is simply too great.

One thing that my staff friends from other regions did assure me, though: No one they know is happy with the policy, even those who hold traditional stances, and no one thinks the process has been executed well. All of them lamented the wreckage and pain that this disaster has caused and will continue to cause. It’s a small consolation. And the apparent disconnect between the people on the ground and the people at the top seems to point to yet another organizational failure.

***

I was surprised by how heavy I felt in the wake of the Time story, given that I already knew about the policy and had seen some of the fallout up close. Part of it was seeing the reaction, particularly from Christians who identify as LGBT and their allies; part of it was also InterVarsity’s response, which was convoluted at best. Shortly after the article’s release, they responded by saying that the piece was wrong; they have no official policy on how their employees feel about civil marriage. Their rebuttal was almost comical, given that this was a semantic error and no one was upset about the organization’s stance on civil marriage equality. The outrage was about the organization’s actual stance — that all same-sex relationships are immoral, and anyone who disagrees needs to leave — which the article accurately described and is far more concerning. IV went on to say that they are taking their stance in an effort to uphold the dignity of all people, which was also hilarious, because their position is a clear affront to the dignity of LGBT people, and this seems apparent to everyone but them.

Things didn’t get really galling, though, until the end of the response: “Within InterVarsity and elsewhere, there are LGBTQI people who agree with this theology, at great personal cost.” I’m still shocked by how tone-deaf this line is, because the great personal cost borne by these LGBTQI people is the result of the message that InterVarsity is trumpeting. These folks have given up the hope of ever having the kind of intimate companionship to which their heterosexual peers are entitled — because organizations like IV demand this as a condition of acceptance. And that’s just the beginning: Some are filled with anxiety that someone might find out about their sexuality, that they will be rejected by their loved ones, or that God will condemn them to hell. Some are depressed because they think they have to be alone forever. Some have been subjected to the abuse of so-called “reparative” therapy, which is opposed by every major medical and mental health association in the country. Some contemplate suicide because they believe that they’re defective — and far too many have followed through. So much of the suffering that LGBT people endure is caused by Christians — even well-meaning ones — who tell them that something is wrong with them, that they are less than, that they are not entitled to the full range of human experiences. So by invoking this suffering in their response, it felt like IV was attempting to garner sympathy for itself by pointing to the pain of the people whom they are oppressing. And that was appalling.

And then, perhaps limited by the bounds of Twitter or perhaps seeing that they had nowhere to go with this line of thinking, the response ended with “We are learning together.” This line feels especially rich in light of the aforementioned email sent to staff, in which IV leadership states, in no uncertain terms, that they will not budge on this issue. Also, it’s hard to believe that you’re interested in learning when you’ve forced all dissent either out of the organization or underground. As Merritt notes, “You cannot engage a conversation when you’re frightening or even firing your partners in that conversation.” So much for learning, then.

The following day, in a longer response, InterVarsity reiterated that LGBT people are welcome in the fellowship — but I have a hard time imagining why an LGBT person would want to be a part of it. Judging from its position paper, IV seems to recognize that sexual orientation isn’t a choice, which is what science and the experiences of the overwhelming majority of LGBT people tell us. So essentially, IV maintains that God would create you a certain way and then deny you the right to the most intimate and meaningful relationship a human being can have. That is completely at odds with my understanding of God as 1. entirely good and entirely loving and 2. an inherently relational God (three-in-one, heyo) who created people in God’s image as relational beings who are fully human only in the context of relationships. The God that IV implicitly describes is not a God that I would be interested in if I were an 18-year-old gay college student, nor one that interests me as a 33-year-old heterosexual adult.

***

Thus, my relationship with InterVarsity is coming to a sad end. I doubt the organization will feel my absence, but for me, this means saying goodbye to a place that’s influenced so many aspects of my life. I find it astounding and heartbreaking that IV is choosing not only to send such a hostile message to a group of people who are already at the receiving end of so much hostility, but also to cut off those who embrace them fully. And I’m just an ally; I can only imagine what this might feel like if I identified as LGBT.

Goodbye, InterVarsity. You were a wonderful home to a lonely freshman 16 years ago. I’m sorry that you’re choosing not to be for so many others.

Are you an InterVarsity alum who’s unhappy about the purge?  You can sign a petition here.

* Name has been changed to protect their identity.

How I Came Around on Gay Marriage

/ Liz / 1 Comment

This piece originally appeared on The Salt Collective, a now-defunct online magazine about culture, faith, and politics.

I climb out of my Pontiac Bonneville and slam the door shut; my 16-year-old brother follows suit on the passenger side. We walk down the beige concrete path to the front entrance of the middle school near my parents’ house, which leads us into the gym. One wall is lined with a row of voting booths, each enshrouded in dirty grey fabric. My heart beats a little faster.

It is November 2004, and I am about to vote in my first national election. I had been three months shy of 18 at the time of the last one, when I watched my fellow college freshmen register to vote in dorm lobbies and on the quad, and when I would eventually hear more about hanging chads and the state of Florida than I ever cared to hear. Four years — a lifetime, really — have passed since then; instead of a wide-eyed, insecure freshman, I am now a newly minted college graduate, enlightened by years of studying and paper-writing and classroom debate. Or so I think, at least.

I step into a booth, my brother to my left (though he is too young to vote himself, he is an aspiring politico who lives for elections), and draw the curtain behind us. I make my largely uninformed choices for president, for congressional representative, for justice of the state supreme court. I quickly breeze through the ballot until we get to the last item, Proposal 04-2, an amendment to the state of Michigan’s constitution:

“To secure and preserve the benefits of marriage for our society and for future generations of children, the union of one man and one woman in marriage shall be the only agreement recognized as a marriage or similar union for any purpose.”

I stare at the text, shifting my weight from one foot to the other. This item is not a surprise. I knew it would be on the ballot. I thought I knew how I was going to vote, but the last few days have brought a wave of second-guessing and self-doubt.

Minutes pass. My brother also starts to fidget. I start to worry that I am taking too much time, that there are people impatiently waiting in line, tapping their feet and checking their watches. I exhale and fill in the bubble for “yes.” It won’t come down to your vote, I try to reassure myself as I gather my things. I open the curtain, feed my ballot through the machine, and step with my brother into the late afternoon sun.

***

In hindsight, the fact that I felt conflicted about the decision at all was a surprise, given the trajectory I had been on in the years leading up to that moment.

I became a Christian when I was 15. The consequences of this change are too numerous to list here, but one of the most immediate was that, after years of trying to make sense of a confusing, ambiguous world on my own, I felt like I finally had clear, black-and-white answers to all of life’s questions. Did evolution happen? Here’s what the Bible says. Why does a good God allow suffering? Got my list of reasons right here. (For real. I had a list.) Thus, I spent the next several years in what I call my neofundamentalist phase, being exceedingly rigid and dogmatic and brashly calling out anyone who didn’t see things in the same way that I did. (I didn’t need to be gentle or tactful, see; I was speaking truth, and if others were hurt or offended, that was their problem, not mine.)

It wasn’t until the end of college that I started to come out of this phase, when I started to realize that almost everything is more complicated than it seems — even when faith is concerned. My original stance on gay marriage had been borne out of the same simplistic reasoning that I used to form all of my political views: “There are verses in the Bible saying that homosexuality is wrong; therefore, gay marriage should not be legal.” I had started to question this position the year I graduated, the same year I found myself hemming and hawing in that voting booth. But in the heat of the moment, my very new, somewhat nuanced way of seeing the world faltered in the face of the staunch dogmatism I had been building for years. Hence the “yes” vote, which was far less surprising than the struggle that preceded it.

***

I would come to regret my vote in a shockingly short amount of time — months, maybe even weeks — as I started, perhaps motivated by my internal debate in the voting booth, to have the kinds of conversations about the issue that I should have had before I went to vote in the first place.

Most significantly, these conversations helped me realize that civil marriage and religious marriage are not the same thing. Even now, I’m surprised by the number of people who don’t know that there’s a difference; when I ask people what civil marriage is, many give me the definition of common-law marriage. So it seems worthwhile to pause and explain:

Civil marriage is marriage in the eyes of the law, secured (in this country) by a marriage license signed by someone the state has authorized to sign these kinds of things. It confers a whole host of benefits, like tax breaks and visitation rights and the ability to be covered by your partner’s health insurance. It is entirely possible to have a civil marriage without having any kind of religious marriage; it happens all the time when people go to city hall to get married by a justice of the peace and don’t have a church or synagogue wedding.

Religious marriage, on the other hand, is marriage in the eyes of your particular faith tradition. Different traditions have different requirements for who can participate and what this looks like. It is entirely possible to have a religious marriage without having a civil marriage, though few people forgo the civil part unless the law forces them to; the practical benefits of being married in the eyes of the state are just too great. But plenty of people for whom civil marriage is not an option — most notably, same-sex couples, until recently — have had religious marriage ceremonies without civil ceremonies or paperwork.

Understanding this distinction helped me see that same-sex civil marriage — the kind I was being asked to vote on in that election — was not a moral issue; it was an issue of civil rights. The government was denying a group of citizens the rights and protections that others freely receive. And that is discrimination.

My brother has long maintained that all couples, same- and opposite-sex, should be issued civil unions and marriages should fall solely under the purview of religious institutions. He’s right, I think — but marriage and the state got tied up centuries ago, and it’s far too late to untangle them. So if heterosexual people can have the rights and privileges that the government bestows on married people, it’s only fair to extend those same rights to same-sex couples.

So shortly after I voted to ban gay marriage in my home state, I realized that I had gotten it wrong. My stance on civil gay marriage should have nothing to do with how I personally felt about gay marriage; it was an issue of making sure that all citizens have equal rights. Churches and religious groups could make their own decisions about whom they would allow to marry — decisions that are protected by the First Amendment — but when it came to government-sanctioned privileges and protections, it was only fair to give those rights to everyone, regardless of sexual orientation.

***

A few years after I changed my stance on gay marriage as a civil rights issue, the needle started to move for me theologically as well. This came as a surprise to me, in no small part because it happened at the evangelical seminary I attended for graduate school.

First, through my various classes, there came the realizations that the Bible wasn’t actually as clear on homosexuality as I previously thought.

Those Old Testament verses in Leviticus? Don’t hold a lot of water, sandwiched as they are between verses about not mixing fibers or eating shellfish, things we do without hesitation or condemnation in our current culture. If we’re under a new covenant, then we’re no longer beholden to those rules.

Sodom and Gomorrah? Not so much about homosexuality but about gang rape and being inhospitable to strangers, to put it mildly.

Paul’s condemnation of homosexuality in various letters? Not the word generally used to refer to same-sex sexual behavior at the time. Probably better translated to mean pedophilia or perpetrators of sexual violence. Consensual same-sex relationships between two people with equal power weren’t so much a thing back then.

Paul’s use of the word “natural” in Romans 1? The only other time he uses that word is in 1 Corinthians 11, describing men with long hair. So what he’s talking about seems to be more about cultural norms than the so-called laws of nature.

So those verses started to lose a lot of their weight. At the same time, I started to see that when viewed as a whole, the trajectory of the Bible moves away from unequal power hierarchies — between men and women, between Jews and Gentiles, between masters and slaves — toward liberation for the oppressed and equal status for the oppressed and the oppressor. And that seems to be a central mission of Jesus; he kicked off his ministry by declaring as much in Luke 4, and he spent most of his time hanging out with and affirming those who had been marginalized by society and shunned by the religious leaders of the day. Which sounds an awful lot like the LGBT community of today.

Second, I became convinced that sexual orientation is not a choice.  Science says it is not; the experiences of the overwhelming majority of gays and lesbians say it is not; reason says it is not. Considering how gays and lesbians have been treated throughout history, and how they continue to be treated in most parts of the world — and even most parts of this country — why would anyone choose that kind of oppression?

Finally, and most powerfully, were the conversations and relationships I started having with people who identify as gay and lesbian.

Though I had gay friends before then, it wasn’t until grad school that I started really hearing the stories of LGBT people. This was in part because I started practicing as a therapist, seeing clients who laid out their deepest struggles and fears, and in part because becoming a good therapist requires you to confront yourself in ways you maybe haven’t before, and several people I knew did the very brave work of facing themselves and dealing with the consequences and were gracious enough to share those experiences. All that to say that suddenly, from peers and clients alike, I started hearing a lot more stories. Stories of people who had tried to change their sexual orientation for years — through reparative therapy, sheer force of will, or some combination thereof — and found themselves not only unable to do so but also plagued by depression, anxiety, self-loathing, and shame as a result. Stories of people who had been told by pastors and churches that they were broken and unlovable the way that they were. Stories of people who had been taught that they were not good the way they had been created, and were thus relegated to a lifetime of condemnation from society and an eternity of the same from the God who created them in the first place.

Needless to say, these stories were devastating to hear — let alone to actually live. And I could not reconcile an all-loving, all-knowing, all-merciful God who would create people a certain way and then require them to forsake one of the most meaningful relationships they could possibly forge, especially as I fell in love and was profoundly transformed by my relationship with my now-husband. I could not reconcile the God I knew and a God who would deny gays and lesbians the same kind of love and intimacy that my heterosexual friends and I got to freely experience.

So I came around on religious gay marriage, too. Again, this transformation wasn’t necessary for me to support civil marriage equality; my personal feelings about the issue were irrelevant, frankly, to the issue of whether or not gays and lesbians should have the same rights as all other American citizens. But this second change also happened, and for that reason, I am all the more elated about the events of Friday and the millions of marriages that are now possible because of the Supreme Court’s decision.

***

I want to conclude by stating that I’m not an expert on this issue in any way. I’m not gay, lesbian, or bisexual, so I don’t have firsthand experience to draw from. I’m not a theologian or a scholar of ancient Greek. I’m aware that in the great scheme of things, the amount that I understand is infinitesimal compared to what I don’t understand. So it’s entirely possible that I could be wrong about all of this. But at the end of the day, this is how I feel convicted, and I would much rather err on the side of more love and more grace and more inclusiveness than less.

For more stories, check out this New York Times interactive piece: How We Changed Our Thinking on Gay Marriage