11th Sunday of Ordinary Time, Year A
Previous Years: 2020 || 2017
Preached at the Church of the Assumption in Bellingham, WA
Recording
https://moorejesus.podbean.com/e/pride-is-a-religion/
Transcript
A little over a decade ago San Francisco got a new archbishop, and at the time there was a parody Catholic news site called Eye of the Tiber, and they ran the headline “New Archbishop of San Francisco, deeply impressed by his city’s devotion to Noah.” And in the article, they fake quoted the Archbishop saying something to the effect of “I love the Bible too. I read it all the time. The Old Testament is certainly a source of great devotion. I’ve just never seen a city that loves Noah and God’s covenant with Him so much. I mean, the rainbows are everywhere here.”
Well, it is June. The rainbows are everywhere. And so, I think we should probably talk about Pride and our relationship to it. But first, two caveats. Caveat number one, this is a homily about ideology, not about individuals. I use Pride on purpose because Pride is an ideology. It’s a way of seeing the world. LGBTQ individuals are not the same thing as Pride. As Christians, we desire to serve, and to love, and to walk with, and to care for every single person who walks through our church. The reason we have to talk about ideology is because how we define love, and service, and care is going to change depending on how we see the world. Caveat number two, growing up in Western Washington, being assigned to Bellingham, I am deeply aware of the fact that we have many Catholics who struggle with the sexual teachings of the Church. In fact, we have many Catholics who are, let’s say, one Pride homily away from walking away from the faith altogether.
This lends for a brief reflection on fatherhood. A lot of fatherhood is setting a direction, setting a goal, inserting yourself to make sure that direction is clear, but then also knowing when to back off and when to allow children to grow in that direction on their own, in their own time, giving them space to follow through of their own initiative. Well, as the father of this community, I deeply and firmly believe that the closer people grow to Jesus Christ, the more the teachings of the Church become clear and obvious. And so, I have poured all of my efforts into preaching about Jesus, setting the direction, but then giving people the space to grow closer to Jesus in their own time, in their own way.
However, in the gospel today, we see Jesus looking out at the crowd and having pity on them because they were troubled and abandoned like sheep without a shepherd. Pride has moved so quickly and so aggressively that I can only think of our community as troubled and abandoned. I have to, as the father of the community, insert myself again. Make sure the direction on this is clear so that we have the space to grow in the proper way. However, if you are someone who struggles with the teachings of the Church, please know that the goal remains the same. If you are willing to grow closer to Jesus every day, then I am going to continue to work to make space for you in this community.
Now, caveats aside, as I’ve been engaging with the Pride movement since college, when it got particularly popular, I graduated in 2010, and then all through seminary, and then in my time as a pastor, the one hermeneutic that has begun to make the whole movement make sense to me is to realize that the Pride movement looks, for all intents and purposes, to the point that I would say the Pride movement is the emergence of a new religion.
What do I mean? Religion comes from the Latin word meaning to bind. From ancient times, that word refers to those things that we bind our life to, particularly those beliefs and actions to which we bind our life. And as opposed to something like history or science, the foundation of religion is always an act of faith. Science, history, you can point at some bones and be like, “this is what happened here.” You can look at a microscope and say, “this is what’s going on.”
But with religion, the commitment is a faith thing. It’s something that you can’t immediately prove or immediately observe. There is a commitment to something unseen from which the rest of the religion flows. So, for example, the Abrahamic religions, Judaism, Christianity, Islam, the foundational center, the foundational faith statement of these religions is that the Creator of the universe has spoken to humanity, has revealed Himself and His nature and His will to human beings. That’s not provable. I can’t hand you a Bible and put it under a microscope and say, “look how this is the Word of God.”
I can’t force you to observe God giving His word to us, revealing Himself to us. That’s a faith statement, that God has revealed Himself to us. It is reasonable, it is rational, I think there are very good reasons to believe it, but at its core, it’s faith. We have faith that the God of the universe, the Creator of all things, has spoken to us. In the Old Testament for the Jews, in the Old and the New Testament for the Christians, in the Quran for the Muslims. Even if we reject the fact that we don’t think that the Quran is the Word of God, even if we reject the Quran, it’s still the same faith that somehow God has revealed himself to humanity.
So, if we consider the Pride movement, then what’s the central faith statement of this new religion? Well, the central faith statement is that the ultimate reality, the realest of real things, is the internal, subjective experience of the human being. So, the Abrahamic religions would say the realest of real things is the revelation of God. Pride would say the realest of real things is the internal, subjective experience.
Now these faith commitments – and you can see how internal subjective experience is a faith commitment, that’s not something I can prove, I know that you have an internal experience, but I can’t prove that this is the realest of real things, I can’t prove that it is the definition of reality. So, you can see how that faith commitment has staggering implications. For the Abrahamic religions, if the Creator of the universe has spoken to you, you get in line with whatever He said. If He says that He is love and you are made in the image of love, then the entire life, your entire life, is dedicated toward trying to be more loving. If the Creator of the universe says, “I created you for this purpose, or to do this thing, or in this way,” then any part of you that goes against what the Creator has said is to be reformed. If my desire is against the will of God, the will of God wins. The goal of an Abrahamic religion is to subject everything to the expressed and revealed will of God. Everything in myself, everything in society. Subject it to God.
Well, with the Pride movement and their faith commitment, that the realest of real things is whatever is going on inside of me, same mechanism. If that’s the realest of real things, if that’s the standard by which all reality is judged, then everything around it has to get in line with that internal subjective experience.
So, for example, in the first phase of the Pride movement that I was exposed to, the fight for same sex marriage, it’s obvious that a marriage between a man and a woman, and all of the other forms of marriage, that they are biologically different. There’s just no way around that. But because the internal experience is what’s the realest of real, you can use the phrase “love is love is love” because they were talking about love as an internal experience and they’re saying, well, that internal experience is the same for everybody. So even though all of these marriages are biologically, provably different, the fight is that they should all be recognized with exactly the same dignity, exactly the same societal structures. That because the internal experience is the most important thing, the external structures have to get in line with the internal experience.
Or the current phase of the Pride movement where we’re talking a lot about transgenderism. Well, again, it’s what’s going on inside of me, everything else has to model itself to that. So, if my body does not fit my internal subjective experience, then the body needs to change. Or if language, if pronouns don’t fit my subjective experience, then that language and those pronouns need to change, society and its structures and its organizations need to change around what’s going on inside of me.
Because my internal subjective experience is the reference point for the rest of reality.
Now, with this hermeneutic, this lens for understanding the Pride movement as an emergent religion, you can see why it is evangelically effective, why so many people have been converted to the new religion. Christianity comes in and it says God is the ultimate reference point. And so, insofar as you do not match God, that’s a problem. Saint Paul uses the words “ungodly” and “sinner” in the second reading today, which means the message of Christianity is “you’re the problem, fix it.”
Really, the message of Christianity is “you’re a problem, God fixed it and receive that fixing.”
But even so, the message is there’s a lot of work to be done. God has saved you. Absolutely. He’s done the hard work, but your whole life is oriented toward, holiness is the positive word, but people will hear it as your whole life is oriented toward work. You need to keep growing in virtue. You need to keep fighting sin. You need to keep going to confession. That’s a hard sell. Going up to somebody and saying “you’re a problem, work on it.” I don’t want that religion necessarily. And so, you can see why Pride is so compelling. Because they come in and they say you’re perfect exactly as you are, and anybody who doesn’t think that you’re perfect is a problem. You don’t need to change anything, everybody else needs to change around you and your internal subjective experience.
That’s incredibly appealing. Of course you’d want to convert to that religion. And it’s not just for LGBTQ folks, because they’re sort of the vanguard of the religion. They’re the celebrated martyrs, if you will. But you can see why Pride also brings in so many allies. If I can take a group of society who was previously referred to as deviant and marginalized for that, and I can say no, this group is not deviant. They are perfect, and they demand to be celebrated. Well by doing that, by saying that their internal experience is perfect and should be celebrated, I’m also saying, well, if they can be celebrated, then I should be celebrated too. It’s a very appealing prospect. The only evangelical power Christianity has in the face of that is simply that we’re right. Simply that we are sinners, and we do know that we fall short of the glory of God. That if we live according to our own plans we will be very unhappy in this life. And living according to the revelation of God is going to make us very happy in this life and the next. But on the surface, if I’m choosing between “you need to work on yourself and change” versus “you’re perfect and I love you.” Evangelical power.
This lens also helps us see why the Pride movement today has become so aggressive. Every religion at some point is tempted by crusade or jihad or whatever word you want to use, because a religion is almost always a matter of life and death. If I’m making a faith commitment, if I’m orienting my life around something that is unseen, that means that that thing is so important that I’m going to make a leap of faith. My entire life is given to it. So, all good religions at some point become a matter of life and death. For Christianity, we talk about eternal life and eternal death, and so we would rather die in this world in order to preach the gospel, because eternal life matters so much, than to preserve our life in this world and lose life in the next. That’s why we have a very long history of martyrdom. Because again, life and death, but eternal life and death, this life doesn’t matter, but that life does. And I’m going to do everything, including die, to preach eternal life. The temptation in religions, though, is to take that matter of life and death, which I think is appropriate for religions, and to say, “well, it must be imposed rather than proposed. This is so important that now I have to force people into the religion for their own sake.”
As though faith can be compelled. If somebody is at gunpoint and I say, “do you believe in Jesus?” and they say “yes,” have they really made a free choice? Does that really count as faith? Well, it doesn’t, but the life and death nature of religion often tempts us to do that anyway, to compel people to faith for their own good. But it doesn’t work. It has to be proposed, not imposed.
Well, Pride as a newly emergent religion is still in its jihadi phase. When Islam spread, the first 150 years was all kinds of just military battles and forcing it on people at the tip of a spear. Well, that’s where Pride is right now. In their mind, the adherents of Pride, it’s a matter of life and death. And because it’s such a matter of life and death, it has to be imposed on everyone because it’s so important. A note on that. In preparation for this homily, I had to go down a lot of internet rabbit holes, and I just want to save you the trouble. The way Pride becomes a matter of life and death is with the statement that if you do not affirm every subjective internal experience, then all of the LGBTQ folks are going to kill themselves. The word that’s used by the most ardent adherents of Pride is genocide. You will actually hear this word in White House press conferences, on the news, in forums, that if you do anything against Pride then you are committing genocide against that community, because again, if you do it, they’re all going to kill themselves.
What’s this based off of? Well, it is empirically true. I believe the data says that suicidal ideation amongst LGBTQ folks is at a much higher level than the general population. That seems to be a fact. The faith statement in that, though, is that affirmation is the solution. It’s that the reason suicidal ideation is so high is because everybody around them is not on board with their internal subjective experience. But that’s a faith statement, because you could say equally that both identification with, and I’d say certain parts of the LGBTQ acronym, but identification with that and suicidal ideation are both symptoms of an internal turmoil, that somehow there is something going on inside of me that I am struggling with, and that causes me to act out in deviant sexual ways as well as to contemplate suicide. Both are equally valid statements, and the data that we have at hand doesn’t prove one or the other. Here’s why. And, I found a site by a very pro-Pride PhD in psychology, who’s listing kind of all of the studies around puberty blockers with children, trying to prove that this is a good thing. Well, all of those studies, if you go down, are the equivalent of taking somebody who’s gone through surgery and asking, “do you feel better now?” They’re very short studies, about two years, maybe sometimes three, five if you’re really lucky. And, it’s always people who self-selected into surgery and are post-surgery.
Well, you can see why they might be motivated to say, “yes, things are better” because what happens if they say no? It means they’ve irreversibly changed their body and they’re not happy. They can’t admit to themselves they’re unhappy because then everything falls apart. It’s a flawed study. The medical gold standard for these studies is a randomized control trial, which is to say you have a group of people affected by something, you randomly put half of them in treatment and you randomly give half of them essentially a placebo, although that’s not possible with surgery. But you randomly treat half and don’t treat half. Well, this site from this guy, he had a note on that. He said, well, you’ll notice none of these studies are randomized control studies which many people are going to be looking for. The reason is because, in his words, it would be unethical not to treat somebody who asks for surgery.
Well, that’s that faith commitment. The faith commitment says the answer is affirmation, including medical affirmation. Because I’ve already accepted that answer, I cannot accept a study that wouldn’t treat people who are in trouble, because treatment is the answer. So, he’s already assuming the treatment is the answer, meaning that you cannot study whether a treatment is the answer, because you’re ethically obligated to treat. The data that we have is flawed. So, if somebody says “this is a matter of life and death, because if you oppose anything that Pride stands for, you’re causing people to kill themselves” that’s a statement of faith that you are allowed to reject.
Now, what do we do with all of this? I propose two things. First, if we accept Pride as a religion, then the Catholic Church has a lot of tools with how to deal with it. Because we have done a lot of work in inter-religious dialogue over the last 60 years. What does the Church do when we dialogue with the Muslims or the Buddhists or other non-Christian or Non-Abrahamic faiths? Well, the first thing we do is we know who we are. When the Vatican sends somebody into this dialogue, they don’t send somebody who doesn’t know the Catholic faith. They send an expert in the faith because they have to represent the faith accurately. Before we can dialogue with Pride, we have to know our own faith. We have to read the statements, particularly by John Paul II, on human sexuality. The Church has a very long history of studying the human person. What have we learned from the self-revelation of God from Jesus, from the tradition, about who human beings are, what our nature is? We have to know that before we can engage. We should also be clear that we’re not syncretists. We don’t believe in the mixing of faiths. We don’t send somebody into dialogue who says, “oh, you know, Christianity and Islam are equally true, and I’m the one who’s going to dialogue.” We have to recognize that if Pride is a separate faith, it’s not our faith. Our faith is based on the self-revelation of God being the center of all reality.
The second thing we do in inter-religious dialogue is we recognize what’s good in the other religion. We believe that every human being is responding to the action of God in their life, and many will respond wrongly, but it doesn’t mean they’re not trying their best. So good will emerge from these other religious traditions. So, what’s good about Pride? Two things. One, their advocacy against violence. Again, faith has to be proposed, not imposed. Any time somebody in the LGBTQ community experiences violence, that’s a huge problem. And it’s an even bigger problem if somebody uses it, uses faith to justify that violence. Their advocacy against violence is a good thing, and we should be on board with them in that. Second, they’re calling us to be serious about what’s going on inside a human person, what this internal experience is. Christians, because God and His self-revelation are the center point of our reality, we often lead with that reality. We often lead with, “okay, here are the rules, this is what God said, you better get on board.” What the Pride movement teaches us is maybe we should lead with a question: “Hey man, what’s going on? What is your lived experience? What are you going through? What are your feelings and emotions and desires and attractions?” That’s much more respectful of the human person, it’s a much better way to speak to them, and it’s a much better way to enter into dialogue.
The third thing we do in inter-religious dialogue is then we challenge. So, we say “I know who I am, I know what we have in common, but here are the differences. Let’s figure this out.”
And I think it’s okay for us to challenge “is your internal subjective experience, which by its nature cannot be shared with anybody directly and by its nature is unique to you, is that the center point of all reality? Or are there ways in which maybe we need to change our actions or our actions based on our internal attractions and desires for the sake of society, or for the sake of other people?”
I think that’s an appropriate challenge. The other way we can challenge is, particularly as Americans, if Pride is an emergent religion, well, suddenly the First Amendment comes into play. Because what we’re seeing today looks like what the framers had in mind with the establishment of religion, where you are excluded from government, you are excluded from industry, you are excluded from public spaces if you do not make a statement of faith. And we’re seeing that today. If you do not make a statement of faith in Pride, and everything they stand for, you are not allowed to serve in certain government roles. You are not allowed to be, maybe, a public school teacher. We should push the Pride movement on that, because this country only exists and succeeds because of the freedom of religion, and we can recognize their freedom to propose their religion, but they have to recognize our freedom to propose our religion.
Finally, I’d like to end where I began. This is a homily on ideology, not on individuals. As Christians, we should desire with all of our heart and all of our faith to serve, care for, and walk with LGBTQ individuals. But we don’t need to make an equation between that care and Pride. Instead, we can say, we should believe, that the best care we can offer somebody is to help themselves see themselves in the light of the God who loves them, the light of the God who revealed Himself to them. The most caring thing we can do for anybody, regardless of internal attraction or desire, is to bring them to Jesus Christ, to help them to receive the adoption that God has given them. The kinship with Jesus on the cross. Their purification and salvation in His blood. Helping somebody live their life in the light of the Lord, who created them and knows them and loves them, is an incredibly loving and compassionate act. I hope that everybody in our lives can be given that gift, the gift of Jesus Christ.
Fr. Moore 