Pride and the Church
The Pride Festival has just wrapped up — a week set aside to celebrate and bring awareness to the LGBTQIA (Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Questioning/Queer, Intersex, Asexual) community. Historically, pride is about celebration and protest. About raising the awareness of oppression faced by those who don’t conform to heteronormativity or gender binaries, and a chance to celebrate people living their lives out in public. While many steps have been made for greater acceptance, by individuals and by governments, there is still work to be done. The Pride Festival is a good chance to reflect on how the institutions we’re a part of can contribute to this.
Historically, the Church has been an impediment to the progress for equal rights of the LGBTQIA community. Instead of serving at the forefront of this issue they’ve fostered a culture of intolerance. They’ve campaigned against progressive government legislation and caused damage to individuals through their hurtful rhetoric and refusal to be accepting.
Growing up, raised in a Catholic family, my awareness of this made my relationship with the Church impossible to maintain. How could I be a part of an institution that condemned my friends to hell and ranked their love and relationships as less than comparative heterosexual ones? How could I proclaim to be a person who cared about justice while participating in an oppressive institution? The moral compass, which I’m sure the Church intends to provide for its congregation, seemed to me to be egregiously off course. I can’t look to the Church for guidance, or seek divine relationship with God, through an institution I see as fundamentally flawed.
I’m sure I’m not alone in this sentiment. It’s not only the individuals themselves who’ve lost something by leaving the Church, but the Church itself, whose community is far less rich for it.
Growing up, the argument I would often have with my parents was that if you don’t like an opinion within the Church, stay in it and fight to change it. Unfortunately, I did not feel the loyalty and connection to the Church that made this feasible, but I acknowledge there are people every day doing exactly this and I admire their integrity and perseverance. There are LGBTQIA people practising their faith and living openly and there are congregations supporting them. But all too often, people being authentically who they are is not encouraged, but merely tolerated.
Change at the top of the Church will be incremental and it will follow, not lead. But that doesn’t prevent individuals choosing to make their community, inside or outside of the Church, one that actively supports LGBTQIA people. The Pride Festival is as good a time as any to reflect on whether we’re doing enough.
While New Zealand has same sex marriage, there are still plenty of laws that continue to oppress LGBTQIA people and, in some cases, actively endanger them. Transwomen are still being incarcerated in male prisons. This not only rejects the identity of these women, but puts them in harm’s way. Gay men who’ve had sex within the last 12 months cannot give blood, even if they are using protection and even if they are in a monogamous relationship. It’s a law that stems from decades-old HIV stigma and it reinforces old stereotypes about homosexual promiscuity. Finally, gay couples cannot adopt a child together. This law actively discriminates and puts in place a bigoted hierarchy about what relationships we value.
Legislative change is bred by community change. It starts small and becomes the norm. I would, therefore, encourage any Church community to investigate their own practice and see where they may be failing. Pride is an opportunity for reflection about what you’re doing to support the LGBTQIA community. There is still plenty of work to be done in New Zealand and it can only be achieved if there is awareness and progress within all of our institutions.
Tui Motu Magazine. Issue 224, March 2018: 27.