Brueggemann's Incredible Insight Into LGBT Equality

I have been gorging on what Walter Brueggemann has said for the past week and find that he not only had come to many of the same conclusions about things that I had, much, much earlier, he has gone a lot farther than I had.  I got there through political thinking, he got there through rigorous and serious consideration of the Bible.

One of the things I'm always getting is the demand of how I can take Christianity seriously when I also am an LGBT equality absolutist.   In this interview with Julie A. Wortman, he shows that fourteen years ago he had a more fully developed concept of the issue than I had at the time. Considering that Walter Brueggemann is a white, straight man, his developed, nuanced appreciation for what that equality means and his lack of unrealistic romanticism about that is rather stunning.


Julie Wortman: Do you think lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (lgbt) folks are sinners?

Walter Brueggemann: Yes, like we all are. So I think that our sexual interpersonal relationships are enormously hazardous and they are the place where we work out our fears and our anxieties and we do that in many exploitative ways. So I don’t think that gays and lesbians and so on are exempt from the kind of temptations that all of us live with.

Julie Wortman: Is their struggle for full inclusion in the life of the church a justice struggle?

Walter Brueggemann: Yes. Martin Luther King, Jr., famously said that the arc of history is bent toward justice. And the parallel statement that I want to make is that the arc of the Gospel is bent toward inclusiveness. And I think that’s a kind of elemental conviction through which I then read the text. I suspect a lot of people who share this approach simply sort out the parts of the text that are in the service of inclusion and kind of put aside the parts of the text that move in the other direction.

Julie Wortman: And what do you do with those other parts?

Walter Brueggemann: Well, I think you have to take them seriously. I think that it is clear that much or all of the Bible is time-bound and much of the Bible is filtered through a rather heavy-duty patriarchal ideology. What all of us have to try to do is to sort out what in that has an evangelical future and what in that really is organized against the Gospel. For me, the conviction from Martin Luther that you have to make a distinction between the Gospel and the Bible is a terribly important one. Of course, what Luther meant by the Gospel is whatever Luther meant. And that’s what we all do, so there’s a highly subjective dimension to that. But it’s very scary now in the church that the Gospel is equated with the Bible, so you get a kind of a biblicism that is not noticeably informed by the Gospel. And that means that the relationship between the Bible and the Gospel is always going to be contested and I suppose that’s what all our churches are doing – they’re contesting.

Julie Wortman: You’ve done a lot of work on the Hebrew prophets. What do you think we can learn from the prophets about justice in this particular issue of lgbt people and their quest for justice?

Walter Brueggemann: As you know the prophets are largely focused on economic questions, but I suppose that the way I would transpose that is to say that the prophets are concerned with the way in which the powerful take advantage of the vulnerable. When you transpose that into these questions, then obviously gays and lesbians are the vulnerable and the very loud heterosexual community is as exploitative as any of the people that the prophets critiqued. Plus, on sexuality questions you have this tremendous claim of virtue and morality on the heterosexual side, which of course makes heterosexual ideology much more heavy-handed.

I have never, in the period of reading peoples' declarations on such issues online or before, come across such a fully developed appreciation for the meaning of LGBT equality, its promise and its problems, in such realistic terms.

I think that our sexual interpersonal relationships are enormously hazardous and they are the place where we work out our fears and our anxieties and we do that in many exploitative ways. So I don’t think that gays and lesbians and so on are exempt from the kind of temptations that all of us live with.

That passage alone, Breuggemann's equalization of gay and straight people as sinners whose sexual activities are equally fraught with the possibility of the corruption into inequality and exploitation, doing harm and worse, makes him more credible than most of the theoreticians and sex columnists I'm aware of.   It is a radical realism which refuses to ignore that sex is fraught with dangers when it isn't kept in check by the full application of love and a commitment to the well being of both of those involved.   That is only going to happen in a majority of instances when sex is within a committed, faithful relationship, marriage being the mere legal expression of that in contractual terms.

The alternative to that, the promotion of adultery - even that entered into by agreement - and all of the carny of free and kinky sex promoted by the champions of "freedom" turns out to have similar consequences in abuse and destruction of people.  Whenever I've pointed out such things as that the most prevalent expressions of hatred of gay men is found in gay porn, that the model of promiscuous abandon practiced in gay oases such as New York City and San Francisco and in local anonymous sex venues across the country was a proven way of death,  the reaction - especially from straight "leftists" has been uniformly hostile.

I long ago concluded that the pathological emphasis put on following rigid sexual rules by the "Christian" establishment was a means of deflecting attention from the radical economic questions and demand for equality which are found in far more verses of the Bible than those dealing with men having sex with men and the such.  It was in the economic interest, the power of the establishments, political and religious, to keep peoples' minds off of the demands throughout the Bible for economic justice and equality, nothing served that purpose better than promoting an obsession with sex - the allure of thinking about sex is another of the perils associated with it.  The legal treatment of such things was certainly not in line with what Jesus did when he had someone accused of sexual misconduct brought to him.   It's entirely more in line with pagan "honor" customs than anything to do with the Gospel of Jesus.  And I think it serves that purpose today.

 I have only just begun to consider that the ends of the rigid sexual moralists and the libertines comes out in about the same place, inequality, exploitation, injustice, prescriptive sex roles as dominator and dominated, etc.   Whatever could be said about that, they come out the same place.  "Sex positive" "feminism" is remarkable for reinforcing exactly the things which the reviled second-wave feminism struggled against, the same thing can be said of the promotion of promiscuity among gay men.