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 Paul
Lynch: Our first speaker today
is an invited speaker, the Reverend Professor Peter John Gomes. Born in
Boston, Massachusetts in 1942, the Reverend Professor Gomes is an American
Baptist Minister ordained to the Christian Ministry by the First Baptist
Church of Plymouth, Massachusetts. Since 1970, he has served in the Memorial
Church, Harvard University and since 1974, as Plummer Professor of Christian
Morals and Pusey Minister in the Memorial Church. A member of the Faculty
of Arts and Sciences and the Faculty of Divinity of Harvard University,
Professor Gomes holds degrees from Bates College and from Harvard Divinity
School and honorary degrees from nine American colleges. He is an Honorary
Fellow of Emmanuel College, the University of Cambridge, England.
Widely regarded as one of
America’s most distinguished preachers, Professor Gomes has fulfilled
preaching and lecturing engagements throughout this country and the British
Isles. He was named Clergy of the Year in 1998 by Religion and American
Life. His New York Times and National Best-selling books, The Good
Book: Reading the Bible with Mind and Heart and Sermons, the Book
of Wisdom for Daily Living, were published by William Morrow and Company.
He has published four additional volumes of sermons as well as numerous
articles and papers. Most people had no idea that Professor Gomes was
gay before he came out, and so when he did, he shook up the university,
the church, and all those in the community who paid attention when he
did come out. Ladies and gentlemen, Professor Gomes.
Peter Gomes: Thank you very much Mr.
Moderator. As I look out among you and have this morning reviewed the
very complete program booklet, I think I can say probably without fear
of contradiction that this is not my usual beat. I have often wondered
what I as a Christian Clergyman would do with a room full of psychoanalysts
under compulsion. The fantasy might intrigue you as much as it has titillated
me, but my assignment here is not to rehash the ancient enmities between
our two professions. It is not for me to tell you how frequently you have
got it wrong. It is not for me to tell you how often I have had to clean
up after you in various places of my profession. That waits for another
occasion and another place. I am sure you might feel the same way yourselves
if any of you had been invited to speak before a gathering of Baptist
Clergy here or anywhere else.
So you can appreciate, I hope,
the delicate and the exquisite sweetness of this moment of which I am
not going to take advantage, but rather will try to address the topic
that has been assigned to me. I am happy to do so because it is a topic
of such critical importance. I would be prepared to posit -- at least
for the sake of our conversation -- that the field in which I profess
some competence has perhaps the formulative responsibility for the perceptions
and the prejudices with which we are now concerned, and I begin with that
statement straightforward.
It falls to me as a Christian
minister and a practitioner of religion to indicate that in the matter
of sexual prejudice, religion is fundamentally a part of the problem and
one can only hope that by acknowledging that, it may well indeed become
part of the solution as well. Perhaps the one thing that my profession
and yours have in common is that we have a great deal to answer for in
the question of this prejudice which we are confronting today.
I have been asked to talk
about the religious basis of prejudice and I am pleased to do so because
I know something about it. I am always happy to speak about things I know
nothing about, but I am thrilled when I am asked to speak on something
about which I do actually know something and have some opinions. I think
I will begin by saying that religion, by its nature, consists of the allocation
of strong convictions. It is therefore deeply engaged in the acts of definition,
and definition -- as you know perhaps better than anybody else -- is both
a self-describing enterprise and a self-excluding enterprise, an exclusionary
process by which the one is defined against the other. Therefore, religion
has inherently within it a stake as it were in setting its adherents apart
from other people and determining the basis of acceptable discriminations.
When I look at what religion
in general, and the Protestant Christian Religion, which is the cultural
religion of this country, in particular, have had to do with the definition
of acceptable prejudices, I have to conclude straightaway that the record
is a sorry one, an unfortunate one, indeed an unhappy one. Going back
to the landing of the Pilgrims in my native Plymouth, Massachusetts where
H. L. Lincoln said, "Upon landing at Plymouth Rock, the Pilgrims first
fell upon their knees and then upon the aborigines, all and both of course
in the Name of God." Deep convictions, clear identities, have inherent
in them, strong prejudices.
The question is whether those
prejudices are ultimately destructive or in some sense can be described
as constructive. Now, when I look at the religious landscape and try to
ask what, in my own experience, was the origin of some of the most profound
social prejudices in our country, I have to revert to that wonderful Christian
Sunday School hymn with which most Protestants at least were brought up:
"Jesus loves me, this I know, for the Bible tells me so. Little ones to
him belong, they are weak, but he is strong. Yes, Jesus loves me, yes,
Jesus loves me, yes, Jesus loves me! How do I know? The Bible tells
me so." Well, Protestantism is based on the conviction that the Bible
tells me all that I need to know, and only what I need to know.
When anyone looks at the record
of our religious treatment of the other in the culture, we find that the
first and the last resort used to justify a prejudice is the fact that
the Bible tells me so. In my book, The Good Book, I tried to take
the hard cases in which this principle was illustrated by looking progressively
at the religious treatment of women, for example. All of the subordinate
and repressive images with a religious sanction against women had arrived
from a particular way of reading Scripture, whether it goes to the notion
of that wanton disobedient woman, Eve, who ate us out of house and home
as it were, or through the images of the Blessed Virgin and ever docile
and faithfully obedient Mary who cancelled out Eve’s sin by doing as she
was told. Somehow, these images, together with the reading of various
Pauline cultural texts as normative provided the basis for centuries of
subordination of woman. When reason and decency and logic and ethics all
defied such treatment, the last resort of the devout like the last resort
of the scoundrel, was of course the Bible.
This is also true in the Christian
original sin, as I call it, of anti-Semitism. The great irony is that
God, who chose to manifest himself in the form of a Jewish baby to a Jewish
mother in a Jewish world and whose people are by acclamation regarded
as the chosen people, is understood as now being removed from the particular
setting of Judaism. Therefore, Christians by their super-sessionist principles
have a right in some sense, an almost constitutional right, to despise
Jews. That terrible inheritance, which is documented in Daniel Goldhagen’s
book, Hitler’s Willing Executioners, indicates that it was not
just good Germans obeying Nazi orders, but centuries of Christian anti-Semitism
which literally got into the water supply and contributed to a climate,
permitting if you will, anti-Semitism to be seen as not at all incompatible
with the Christian faith.
We do not have to go to Germany.
In our own country, the whole principle of racial segregation was based
not on some indifference to Scripture, but on some very clear notion that
Scripture sanctioned racial prejudice, Scripture sanctioned racial segregation,
and that the most religious, most churched, most piously populated parts
of the country not coincidentally happen to be those places in which racism
and slavery and segregation long have flourished. The most pious people
found the Bible their easiest ally in maintaining the advantageous social
status quo, and saw no conflict in their consciousness between their religious
profession on one hand, and their heinous social practices on the other.
We have seen in recent months where the South African Dutch Reformed Church
apologized publicly and profusely for what it called its abuse of Christian
scripture in the maintenance of racial and social apartheid. It should
be a source of some pause in our country that the Southern Baptist culture
-- and I am not knocking them exclusively but they are so representative
of this problem -- is so visibly represented even today in the determination
of our public policy where there seems to be very little discrimination
between Christian conviction on the one hand, and advantageous social
policies -- advantageous to them -- on the other hand. As it has already
been pointed out, overt discrimination against women, Jews, and racial
minorities is mostly legally and even more importantly socially, unacceptable
in this country.
The last place where such
a prejudice is permitted, so it seems for the same reasons as all of the
others have been permitted, is in the question of sexual identity and
sexual orientation. It was to this that I turned my attention in my book
and have turned my attention in recent years, because I concluded, on
the basis of outbreaks of anti-homosexual hysteria in the last five to
seven years, that there had to be a sufficiently grounded prejudice to
sustain all of the social criticism that would surround such antediluvian
points of view as we have seen wherever the issue has come up.
The last and the first resort
of the bigot in these cases is the sanctified sanction of religion. If
we say the Bible tells me so in our religiously saturated culture, there
appears to be no card, no hand, that can trump that particular card or
that particular hand. Therefore, it seemed important to me to argue this
case from within the religious circle rather than to articulate secularist
ideas on the outside, throwing bricks at the ecclesiastical house of glass.
It is within communities of faith, it is within communities of religious
conviction that the last prejudice really has to be addressed, because
the people who hold such a prejudice on religious grounds will not respond
to, or listen to, any other basis for the critique of their points of
view or of their practices. Now I hasten to say that in my opinion the
Bible does not create prejudice, but it does confirm prejudices that already
exist if you wish them to do so. It was Francis Bacon, I believe, who
said that anyone, including the devil, can find the text for his own behavior
and his own predilection.
The fact that the Bible is
not a systematic handbook of philosophy or even of religion, but an enormous
library means that if you are a clever browser, you will certainly be
able to find almost anything to support your particular enterprise. The
real issue is not what can be found in the Bible, but what the biblical
principles are that allow us not only to read the Bible intelligently,
but to live our lives faithfully as religious people. It comes to me,
not as an original thought but as a thought that needs to be amplified,
that we do not read the Bible in terms of trying to find social precedent
or even to justify social practice. What we do try to find in the Bible
are those overriding principles that hold together otherwise unresolved
and even contradictory social notions.
On the one hand, principles
that imply the cheapening of life as it is seen in the subjugation and
derogation of women, or the destruction of the enemy, or in such things
as polygamy, slavery and social peonage and, on the other hand, those
principles by which slaves are set free, by which all are understood to
be part of God’s intended design and of God’s new creation in both Hebrew
and Christian scriptures and by which identity is formed in the ultimate
of blessed relationship we are created in the image of God. If we want
to know what God looks like, we therefore have to look at one another
in order to get something of that picture and that means that God looks
like the woman, God looks like the black, God looks like the homosexual,
God looks like any and all of us.
It is a frightening notion
and a frightening enterprise and it is no surprise, or should not be any
surprise that deeply convicted religious people tend by and large to be
socially conservative people, people whose vocation depends upon establishing
absolute and other exclusive distinctions. They like the status quo. They
will do everything in their power either to preserve it or to return to
it, sometimes at the point of a gun and often times through both polemic
and subtle forms of intimidation. I have come to the conclusion that,
at least for people like myself who are practicing religious people, the
way to function within the communities of faith is to address the contradiction,
the disconnect, as we now like to say, between profession of principle
on the one hand and grievous practice and violation of their principle
on the other hand and to do so not simply with a wagging of the moral
finger, but by pointing to the moral high ground which the Bible and all
of our religious traditions affirm.
When Jesus is asked what is the summary of the law, he does not give doctrinal
answers. He does not say he wants to believe certain things. He does not
offer half of the rationale that the most Orthodox Christians and the
most rabid fundamentalists offer. Jesus answers that question very simply:
you shall love the Lord, thy God, with all of your heart, soul, mind and
strength, and your neighbor as yourself. On these two, says Jesus, hang
all the laws of the prophets.
The ethical conviction begins
with the affirmation of that principle, and from it all else is derived.
We have watched in our own lifetime, you and I, each of the walls of prejudice
assaulted and brought low. We have watched the prejudice against women
addressed and transformed; the same against Jews, and the same against
racial minorities. Logic suggests that this last prejudice will meet that
same fate. It will meet it with the same combination, in my opinion, of
consistent moral rigor, social outrage, political seriousness, and an
appeal ultimately to moral and social conscience. It will happen, we have
seen it happen before, and I believe that we are seeing it happen now.
The fact that these dreadful,
horrific exercises of intolerance and violence, such as the death of Matthew
Shepard a few months ago, indicate not the strength of the opposition
to a revised view, but the sense that there is an inevitability about
it, which makes those who do not wish to see it happen all the more perverse,
all the more violent, and all the more determined to stop what they regard
in some respects as an inevitable movement. I conclude, therefore, that
while religion and, I might add, psychoanalysis have a lot to answer for,
they also have a very important role to play in what is nothing less than
the transformation of social attitudes and the climate which we construct
for honorable men and women and young people to live in. I conclude that
it is never too late -- never too late to change one’s mind as you and
I have done all the time. It is never too late to change one’s heart,
whereby we encourage and encounter the varieties of social and religious
conviction, and it is certainly never too late to change our habits. We
change them all the time. When you think of the state of racial relations
in this country as recently as 25 years ago, and remember when people
said you cannot change hearts by legislation, I stand to tell you that
you jolly well can, and that the country and the culture is the better
for those changes. The last place in which those changes should take place
is the subject which is before us today. Thank you.
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