1. Tallinn, 8-9 October 2010 ‘Diversity Enriches” Religion and Homosexuality

2. ✤ More often than not, religious institutions and leaders act for political not religious reasons ✤ Sexual ethics are not central to the Christian faith, but are often used as a weapon ✤ I foresee increased religious intolerance and fundamentalism ✤ Though violence in the name of Jesus is frequent, the true spirit of Jesus creates community within and out of diversity and difference ✤ Roman Catholics and Protestants have quite different grounds for objecting to gay and lesbian persons

3. The politics of homosexuality ✤ More often than not, religious institutions and leaders act for political not religious reasons because: ✤ the need to accommodate a conservative constituency ✤ the weight of tradition ✤ institutional friction and politics ✤ institutional inertia

4. Religion and sex ✤ Sexual ethics are not central to the Christian faith, but are often used as a weapon ✤ In all religions sexuality is a barometer of the development of human consciousness ✤ Sexual morality is frequently held as the test of all morality ✤ It is an easy weapon for repression, control and discrimination ✤ But in all serious interpretations of Christianity, it is a peripheral, not central issue

5. The religious situation ✤ I foresee increased religious intolerance and fundamentalism ✤ extreme and violent Protestant fundamentalism ✤ doctrinaire and archaic Roman Catholic positions ✤ Reasons: breakdown of secularism and scientism; loss of restraints on human violence by civil and religious traditions ✤ The truly different or strange is and will be held to be dangerous and perverse

6. The true spirit of Christianity ✤ Though violence in the name of Jesus is frequent, the true spirit of Jesus creates community within and out of diversity and difference ✤ The core of the faith of Jesus is the creation of a universal and inclusive community ✤ But too often, that faith is local and exclusive ✤ Its vision and purpose is to give hospitality to the outsider; to listen, not moralize; to see the strange, different, even dangerous, as a brother or a sister; to remove all categories of “Us—Them”

7. Roman Catholic vs Protestant ✤ Roman Catholics and Protestants have quite different grounds for objecting to gay and lesbian persons ✤ Both rely on the Bible ✤ Both have traditional ethical and moral codes and teachings that set man-woman relations as the norm ✤ But each approaches the issue of homosexuality in quite different ways

8. Roman Catholic grounds for objection ✤ The RC basis: “Natural law”, the God-created order of the world, life and human nature ✤ gay/lesbian persons represent a “faulty nature”, which must be corrected ✤ homosexual acts arise out of this faulty nature and are, for that reason, proscribed

9. Roman Catholic grounds for objection (cont.) ✤ BUT: if it is empirically discovered that homosexuality is not a disorder, but a natural, intrinsic fact of nature, then a correction will have to be made in the understanding of human nature ✤ Such a recognition of the nature of homosexuality has already been made by the Roman Catholic Church! ✤ But why, then, is there is no change in the acceptance of gay/lesbian persons and acts?

10. Protestant grounds for objection ✤ The Protestant basis for objection to homosexuality is not based on “facts out there”, but on Revelation (i.e., the Bible) ✤ No amount of “proof” or “scientific evidence” would count as reason for a change of position ✤ A change of position can only come from a new revelation, i.e., new interpretation of Biblical texts ✤ Such new interpretations have, of course, been given ✤ Why, then, are they not accepted by all Protestants?

11. Final thoughts ✤ The enemy of truth is not the noise of those who oppose the truth, but the silence of those who know the truth, but dare not speak the truth ✤ We should always ask whether differences should be a threat or a discovery, a surprise, even a new joy ✤ In the face of diversity, one needs humility; humility is the ability to laugh at ourselves, and laughter quickly makes all differences relative