I recently read Jordann McMahan’s powerful opinion piece at BNG about her experience as a queer student at Baylor University’s Truett Seminary.
Jordann writes with remarkable vulnerability about an experience that is complicated. She does not paint every professor, student or experience at Truett with the same brush. She acknowledges people who loved her, encouraged her and privately supported her. She writes, with wisdom and balance: “The truth about Truett Seminary is that good people are doing good work within those walls. And also there is active harm happening.”
Brian Henderson
Both things can be true. Good people can do good work within institutions that cause harm. People with good intentions can say harmful things. Churches that believe themselves hospitable can create environments in which people are afraid. Seminaries committed to preparing people for Christian ministry can fail to prepare those same people to minister faithfully to LGBTQ people. And words, spoken and unspoken, are part of how that happens.
Jordann describes classmates referring to LGBTQ people as “demonic” and suggesting they were destined for hell, while professors remained silent. She describes learning very early in her seminary experience that she needed to be careful. She learned to be afraid. That fear followed her into classrooms, her work as a resident chaplain and even the writing of a theology paper. Eventually, the weight became so great that, as Jordann writes, “I am so grateful to be around today, but that experience was the closest I ever have come to making the decision not to be alive.”
We need to sit with that sentence because, at that point, we are no longer having an abstract debate about biblical interpretation, denominational identity, theological disagreement or even the appropriate language for discussing human sexuality and gender. We are talking about a life.
The podcast follow-up
After reading Jordann’s article, I listened to Episode 52 of “Stuck in the Middle with You,” one of Baptist News Global’s podcasts featuring BNG Publisher Mark Wingfield and Baptist blogger Ben Cole.
Mark and Ben bring noticeably different perspectives to their conversations, and I want to honor that. Our Baptist tradition, at its best, has room for disagreement, dissent and vigorous conversation. We do not have to reach identical theological conclusions in order to take one another seriously. But taking one another seriously matters.
Early in their discussion, Ben acknowledges he does not understand many of the ways LGBTQ people identify themselves. Referring to those identities as something of an “alphabet soup,” he says once the conversation moves beyond lesbian, gay and perhaps bisexual identities, he gets lost. I suspect Ben is hardly alone.
“Intention does not erase impact.”
I have heard similar comments from pastors, church members and otherwise thoughtful, well-intentioned people. Sometimes the comment is accompanied by laughter, frustration or an eye roll. Often the person speaking probably means little harm by it. But intention does not erase impact.
There is an important difference between saying, “I don’t understand,” and speaking in a way that makes another human being’s identity sound ridiculous because I do not understand it. “I don’t understand” can be an admission of my limitations. “I don’t understand, so your identity is alphabet soup to me” makes someone else’s humanity the problem. Our lack of understanding does not give us permission to speak carelessly about another person’s life.
The letters represent people
These are not letters. These are people.
L. G. B. T. Q. Those letters are shorthand. They are imperfect attempts to name the breadth and beauty of human experience. But behind every letter is a person: a lesbian teenager wondering whether she can tell her youth minister the truth; a gay seminarian wondering whether being honest about himself will jeopardize his call to ministry; a bisexual church member who has spent years hearing their identity is merely confusion; a transgender college student listening carefully as classmates debate whether people like them should be permitted to exist openly in Christian community; a nonbinary young person trying to find language for something they have struggled to understand about themselves; a queer Christian wondering whether there is room at the “table” for them.
“These are not abstractions or theological problems waiting for us to solve them. They are people.”
These are not abstractions or theological problems waiting for us to solve them. They are people. They are lives. And those lives matter more than our discomfort with language we have not yet taken the time to understand.
I must admit that some of the emotion I feel around Jordann’s article, Mark and Ben’s conversation, and the larger debates we continue to have about human sexuality and gender identity is personal. I came out later in life, in no small part because of the harmful rhetoric I learned in church and within Christian institutions of higher learning, including seminary. I know what it is like to hear language about gay people while quietly knowing that language is also about you. I know what it is like to be questioned and judged because of who I am as a gay man. And, like Jordann, I know something of the darkness of suicidal ideation.
That is why I cannot hear these conversations as merely theological exercises or disagreements over terminology. I know something of what can happen when the words spoken in sanctuaries, Sunday school rooms and Christian institutions, even podcasts, become words we carry within ourselves.
Learning to understand
But I also am learning something else. There is far more life in living when we learn to love and understand one another more fully. There is freedom in being known rather than hidden, in being encountered as a person rather than discussed as an issue, and in discovering communities where questions can lead to curiosity rather than condemnation. That, too, is why our words matter: not only because words can diminish life, but because words spoken with humility, compassion and a genuine desire to understand can help make fuller life possible.
This is where Jordann’s critique of theological education becomes especially important. Whether a pastor is affirming, nonaffirming, undecided or somewhere in between, that pastor will minister to LGBTQ people. They already are. Queer folk are everywhere. We always have been.
“All pastors will preach to LGBTQ people, baptize them, visit them in hospitals and counsel them through grief.”
All pastors will preach to LGBTQ people, baptize them, visit them in hospitals and counsel them through grief. They will sit beside parents whose child has just come out, minister to teenagers frightened that someone will discover who they are, and walk with families trying to reconcile faith, Scripture and love. They will officiate weddings, or explain why they will not, preside at funerals and stand beside hospital beds. And sometimes they will encounter someone whose experience of gender or sexuality they simply do not understand.
Not knowing everything is permissible; none of us understands everything. But remaining incurious about the lives of people entrusted to our pastoral care is another matter.
A minister cannot faithfully respond to another human being with the equivalent of, “Once you get beyond the identities I understand, you lose me.” Perhaps being lost is precisely the invitation to listen, to ask questions, to read, to learn and to allow another person to tell us who they are without immediately deciding who we think they ought to be.
The power of words
Christians spend a great deal of time talking about words. We preach them, pray them, sing them, study them, debate them, publish them and build doctrines around them. We know, or at least we should know, that words have power. Words can bless or wound, welcome or exile. Words can tell a frightened young person, “There is room for you here,” and words can send that same young person searching for the nearest closet.
But ultimately, this conversation is about more than words. It is about lives.
Jordann’s testimony reminds us of that with painful clarity. Behind every theological conversation about LGBTQ people are LGBTQ people who are listening. They are sitting in our pews, enrolled in our seminaries and serving in our ministries. They are raising our children, teaching our Sunday school classes, singing in our choirs and answering calls to all kinds of ministries. Sometimes they are listening while we do not yet know they are there. That should matter to us.
This is where Jordann’s story also offers me hope, and I hope it does for others as well. She describes the SBC, the Secret Book Club, where classmates gathered because they wanted to learn. They read, wrestled with Scripture and considered approaches they had not been given in the classroom. She describes classmates who sought her out because they wanted to know how to respond faithfully when LGBTQ people entrusted them with their stories.
“’I don’t understand’ can become a wall, or it can become a doorway.”
They did not have all the answers, but they were willing to learn. There is a world of difference between those two things. “I don’t understand” can become a wall, or it can become a doorway. For Christians, and particularly for those of us entrusted with the care of others, I hope it becomes a doorway.
We do not need to understand another person completely before we can listen to them, care for them or recognize the sacred worth of their life. Perhaps the willingness to remain curious, to listen rather than dismiss, to ask rather than assume, is itself an expression of love.
Our words matter. Our words can harm, and our words can heal. But behind our words are human beings whose dignity is not dependent upon whether we understand them, whose humanity is not ours to debate, and whose lives are far too precious to be reduced to letters we find confusing.
So when someone entrusts us with the truth of who they are, perhaps our first response need not be, “I don’t understand you.” Perhaps it can simply be, “Thank you for trusting me. Help me understand.” Because words matter, but lives matter infinitely more.
Brian Henderson serves as executive director of the Association of Welcoming and Affirming Baptists.
Related:
My experience at Baylor’s Truett Seminary | Opinion by Jordann McMahan