Dorothy McRae McMahon speech Melbourne Conversations at the Town Hall 30th January 2004 “To be Gay/Lesbian and Christian..and that’s a fact”

Thank you very much for that welcome. It’s lovely to come back to one of my home towns, one of many home towns. And I thought to myself, we must mention to the City of Sydney this idea of using the lower Town Hall for such events; be a good development. Why is homosexuality such a big and divisive issue in the church? When I was thinking about this it seemed to me that there were a number of streams of understanding that have produced this divisiveness as we look at the way the church is handling the whole issue of sexuality. The first I think is its connection as it always is with the great religions of the world with the cultures of the world.

A friend of mine some years ago collected all the words for homosexuality from each of the tribes in Africa and it was very interesting to see how many of them were negative, and yet there were also some positive. We also had a look at that in the Pacific, just for interest. Where you have tribal groups of people and found the same thing. Most of the Pacific had negative words for homosexuality, but the Maori people regarded gay and lesbian people as very special. They were special, they were the artists and the healers, and they were highly honoured.

And so there has been a variety of experience in history. But nevertheless you’d have to say that probably most primitive tribes of people, if you look back in the centuries have had problems with anybody who was a bit different. And most particularly people who they thought might be threatening the fertility of the tribe. I mean they were talking about survival in those days. And therefore if you look at the way the biblical record, the biblical writings intersected with those ancient cultures and tribes you can see embedded in the biblical record the historic understandings, the ancient understandings of life, and of God in fact.

And of course when something becomes embedded in a religious writing it becomes far more fixed often than it is in a culture itself. Culture moves on, but because it became embedded at some point in the religious writings of one of the great faiths, then it’s very hard to shift that, even though the culture moves on. So I think you can see that. I think that because that is there You can also see that if the church now has a problem with the issue it’s really an extreme version of the Catholic Church saying you may not eat meat on Friday, and then all of a sudden saying, oh yes you can. And Catholics think ohh, what! Oh. I remember with Methodists and dancing. I mean I was 16. Not allowed to dance, very wicked, And then all of a sudden the church said, oh you can, yes that’s alright you can dance now. And we thought, ohh, so what was wrong. In other words when we now look at sexuality it’s a far far greater subject than dancing I think. I think it’s a far greater subject than eating meat on Friday. I think it is, I never really fully understood that one I must admit. It is a much deeper and more powerful issue, and the churches in general, all of them really, have been holding a position for nearly 2000 years. And in the late 20th century and now into the 21st century some Christians are beginning to reflect on this and to separate it out from the cultural roots that were there. And to have a look again at what might be the right way to go. And of course I have some sympathy in a way, even though it is very painful, I have some sympathy for average church people who say, oh wait a minute umm, it was wrong then, now it’s okay. So there is that sort of struggle that is going on.

And I’d have to say that – and I say this as a member of the clergy – that I think we used to talk about the priests chaining the bible to the pulpit. Well in my view the clergy still have chained the bible to the pulpit, and we have not handed over the scholarship and the understandings that have been taught in most mainstream theological colleges and seminaries over 75 years at least. I mean when my father trained as a Methodist minister here at Queens College at Melbourne University, he was taught much the same view of scripture as I was taught when I trained 50 years later. And yet the clergy have not handed it over to the people. And I must say when I was National Director for Mission for the Uniting Church I said that to our colleges and I said that to our clergy over and over again. That we have not given the tools to the people for them to work with, a framework of scripture. So that if we have big division now it’s because people are falsely holding to views that could be worked with quite creatively if they had understood even the last 50 years of biblical scholarship and theology.

So what happens when we say, ahh but let us look again at some of these old texts, just as the church looked at the texts on slavery a few hundred years ago. Let us look at that again. People don’t know how to do it. And so what I observe is that, and I have gone around parishes, that we are dealing with people whose faith is resting on a very fragile and fearful base of literalism and fundamentalism. So that if you pull out one text or they think you are pulling out one text, then their whole faith is shaken. So there is much at stake, it’s not just about sexuality it’s about people’s very faith being rocked as we begin to challenge some of these assumptions about what might be there in the religious writings.

The truth is that in the bible there was no word for homosexuality. They wouldn’t have had that word. They didn’t have that word in their cultures. And I’m interested to see that the outgoing primate of the Anglican Church in his most recent book has said just that. There was no word. They just saw people as doing different things, and making comment on that. But alongside that you also had things like the David and Jonathan relationship being described by David when Jonathan died as he having a love which surpassed his love for a woman.

Well you know, that may not have been a sexual relationship, we don’t know. But it is a very powerful thing to say. And so all sorts of things are there and they are ambiguous and very reflective of their culture.

I think too that the second reason that the issue is so divisive is that for many centuries the church has laboured quite frankly under the messed up life of Saint Augustine. I mean he did have a messed up life. He had a child by a woman out of wedlock and then went into the priesthood. And then thereafter has influenced the church down the many many centuries. The whole church not just the Catholic Church, and he moved the church towards a sense that the flesh was of the devil and very tempting, and specifically that women personified this fleshly temptation. So the church from very early on got really messed up about bodilyness in general.

There was also the influence of the Greeks on Christian thought, which in fat made a dualism rather than the healthy holding together of body, mind, heart and soul that the Jews had, the people of Israel had in their writings and their culture. And we had this split where the soul and the spirit is sort of something pure and the mind is close to that. The body on the other hand is a bit suspect.

So in saying that I’m saying that the church is really messed up about sex and about bodies, and we need to do a huge amount of work on this as a community of people. And therefore we’re not good about dealing with it.

Then finally in this section what I am saying, I think you’d have to say that well, put it this way, when I am in a debate in many environments, particularly in our church councils, and when I watch the sort of frenzy of fear in our opponents, I would have to say as I watched them – I mean I watched them with a degree of pain and challenge – but I’m sitting there thinking, well I’m feeling very peaceful and serene about my life, what’s your problem. And I sort of look at them and it seems to me that what they are battling with is far more than, well that there are greater battles going on inside them than outside them.

I don’t know what their problems are, I’m not saying that they’re all closet homosexuals or something like that, I’m not saying that. But what I am saying is that because of the degree of fear and anguish that you can see in them as they conduct the debate, I suspect there are many things going on that are bringing fear forward in their lives, quite apart from the pragmatic and theological and biblical issues that confront us on this issue.

They go to extraordinary lengths. I’ll tell you this one, I can’t believe this one. But I was informed reliably that in the debate in the Anglican diocese of Sydney in its last general synod meeting someone said to the people who were implacably opposed to us that they pointed out that slavery was there in the bible. The word of God which they say that they maintain through the generations. Paul says slaves obey their masters. And someone challenged the conservatives to explain how they then deal with that.

And the Dean of Sydney, Philip Jensen, got up and said: oh no problem about that. It’s actually about prisoners, they’re the slaves. Like in our jails, they’re the slaves. Well, come on. Pretty weird, you’d have to say, unless as my partner said: well gosh were all the African Americans, were they all criminals, I see, right. I mean what a stupid thing to say quite frankly. In other words there’s a sort of a very convoluted struggle to try and bring into line every word that is there in a way that is quite impossible.

Why do I stay involved in the church? Well before I share that I want to say that I am not one that has ever said everybody should come out and that everybody should stay in the church. I would never say that. Because to do that for some people would be to collude with those who wish to destroy them. I am very privileged, I have a lot of support, I have a long long life in the church. I am not alone, I am not in some country town all by myself. And even though I have had a fairly tough journey in some ways, it is nothing like that which would be faced by many people in isolated areas. And I don’t expect them or would ever ask them to stay in a church if it is not the spot for them, if it’s going to destroy their life, nor to come out for that matter. So I want to make that very clear.

But why I stay is that I am determined to bring in the changes in the Uniting Church, and to have the Uniting Church – I mean with other people of course – and to have the Uniting Church stand with increasing numbers of churches around the world who have now dealt with this issue, and have gone on perfectly well in the face of that decision. Like the United Church of Canada, the church in, the Methodist Church of N.Z., the church in Sweden, certain Anglican dioceses. I mean there are churches, numbers of churches around the world. The United Church of Christ in the States, they did this in the 70′s for goodness sake and they’re perfectly, they’re ticking along perfectly well. So I am determined that our church will join that group of people.

The church is like my family. I was born into it and I refuse to leave it because some members of it are destructive, at this stage anyway. I stay because I believe that every institution in society, including the church must be changed. And if you have a spear of influence in any part of society, in any institution or section of society, I believe that if possible it is good to use that influence to make the changes where you are and where you have the capacity to exercise some influence.

I stay because I do have some influence still, and I stay to honour the life of people like my friend Don who died with a broken heart because of what my church did to him. Don was a Presbyterian. He lived on the South Coast of NSW. He was a Presbyterian originally, but all his life lived in that area with his family, played the organ, Sunday School Superintendent, faithful, faithful Christian man. He came into the Uniting Church, unlike the Presbyterian Church in his town and came across to the Uniting Church with great hope. He was a leading person in that church, playing much the same roles; choir leader, all those things. A man around 60. And he so trusted his friends in that congregation that one day he decided to tell them that he was gay. And he wanted to tell them that because he found a partner, and he told them.

Well they pulled him up before the eldest council. You mightn’t realise it, but the Uniting Church does have a process for excommunication. In all my nearly 70 years in the church I have never seen it exercised, except on this occasion. They asked him to denounce his or renounce his gayness and end his relationship. When he said he would not they excommunicated him. He had a chance to appeal and I became part of that appeal because he was allowed to have an advocate. And the appeal was to the presbytery which is like a small diocese, it’s a regional body. When we had the debate there was Don, that faithful gentle man sitting there, as members who call themselves Christian. I still feel emotional about it. Members of our church said things about him as though, as though they couldn’t hurt him somehow. They said the most dreadful things about – they thought they were sort having this debate about homosexuality – and here was the very man who they were talking about, sitting in their midst. It broke his heart. He died not long ago, but it broke his heart because he had placed his hands, his life in their hands and they had betrayed him.

If that is Christian I don’t want to be a Christian. I don’t believe it is. I will never believe that it is. Another occasion I was out in the backblocks of NSW speaking for the NSW government about something. And a couple of people came a hundred miles, a 100 k’s rather, in order to speak to me after I had spoken to this conference. They were elders in the Uniting Church. They lived in this small country town all of their life, and their son as he left to go to university, who had been a member of the local youth group and much loved, told them he was gay. And they loved him and they were loyal to him because they loved him. The church told my church out there told them to reject him.

What is this? What other issue would require parents to reject their own children. What is this? Those two people, those two faithful middle aged people sobbed as they told me that they to of course leave their church because they were not going to leave their son. And where could they go in a small country town. There was nowhere else to go. I mean how can that be of the faith. I stay to fight that and to honour the lives of people who hold the ground at great cost and often with great wounding. So I stay to work with that.

I also stay because – well when I say I stay I don’t stay very centrally, I move into the centre again at assembly time sometimes as you may have observed – but most of the time I stay in the friendly edges of it. My parish where I have my membership is in Redfern, Waterloo in Sydney. And I assure you that the struggling people in that area wouldn’t even notice my sexuality. I mean for goodness sake, what they are struggling with is so huge and so dire and so life threatening for them that the fact that I am a lesbian they think, so? For goodness sake. So I stay there in that beautiful and friendly and real and splendid spot. Where to place the Gospel on the ground, if it lives there it lives anywhere. So I am staying there in a pretty safe place.

But I also stay because I know that in spite of most people being outside the church in this country, much homophobic activity in the community uses the church as its reference point. I mean a couple of years ago I was asked to work with the police, NSW Police liaison, gay-lesbian liaison officers to train some police officers. So I’m sitting in a room of about half the size of this with all these police officers. And they asked me to tell my story, which I did, and then any questions were invited. All the police threw texts at me, biblical texts. And I said oh you know, we have some Christians here do we? No, no they said no. So, but interesting they were using our texts against me, and interesting that they felt that they were going to justify their behaviour against gay and lesbian people on the streets of Sydney by throwing biblical texts around behind themselves, or placing them underneath what they were doing. In the end I must say I said, no excuse me I have a Bachelor’s degree in theology, do any of you have that? Any one done any bible study here? No. Well I’m the expert on this not you. So we had a bit of fun then I must say.

But after I had been at the assembly here in Melbourne there was a lot of press coverage when we made our decision in the Uniting Church at that point. And I did an interview on Sky television, and people were invited to ring in. (back to Dorothy) Well, it was very fascinating. The abuse that came forth, and the interviewer quite rightly said as people called me various things like slut and so on, umm. Oh so you’re a Christian. Oh no mate, no no I’m not a Christian but I believe in the good book.

So in other words the church is used as a reference point and until that stops and people can no longer use the church like that and its statements and its dogma then we have to work on the changes.

Finally, if I think of the future. I decided that when I turned 50 I wasn’t going to waste life if I had any say in that. That I would in fact always try and work on a creative edge. That I wouldn’t just sort of – I spent a fair bit of my life as you can hear in a sense – the awards in some way actually recognise people who endlessly bang their heads against brick walls. I mean that’s sort of part of it I think. With all the best will in the world. But I decided to work with the creative edge of it if I could, on any front. Which is why I did resign as National Director for Mission.

I resigned because I could see that if I stayed I would spend all of my life defending myself, and so would my colleagues in order to hold me there. And I thought I don’t want to live like that. I can do much better things. So I moved to the edges and just move into the centre every now and again, and use my energy. If I keep using it like that from the edges it’s because I find that community at large is deeply interested in this question and well ahead of the church. I see them, I watch them commit suicide, because they are hated and rejected. That is serious. And therefore if we are really working here with life and death stakes for very many people. And as far as I am concerned we may not rest.

ENDS

http://www.abc.net.au/compass/s1192915.htm

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