There was a lot of traffic on Facebook
about this book a few months back with positive feedback from a lot of friends
however the whole premise gave me the creeps so I felt I had to take a look and
see if Facebook’s positivity was all hype or if there was actually some
worthwhile substance behind it all.
The premise, that Tim Kurek a
fundamentalist Southern Baptist spent a year living as a gay man in order to
“walk in their shoes” just seems, at best, a bit naf while running the risk of
so many clichés that it makes my skin crawl even imagining.
But thank God the book really is not that
bad, I will go on to a number of things that were, for me, less than perfect
but I feel it is important up front to say that my fears were unfounded – it is
a book of great sensitivity, and I think Tim is a really sincere guy who has
done a great service to a great many.
The first gap you have to bridge is that
the context Tim starts in, the America Conservative Christian “South” which has
no real mirror here in the UK,
yes we have fundamentalist Christians but they are very much in the
minority. We simply do not have the
“Christian” schools and universities that would allow kids it grow up so
completely in the bubble of fundamentalist Christianity, as Tim clearly
did. Those who do create that kind of
bubble in the UK
have to do so in a very conscious counter-cultural way but for Tim and almost
everyone he knew growing up the bubble was just normal. The second gap is that the gay world he
stepped into, it’s not like any I have encountered in the UK, it is perhaps a mythical “Gay Community” of
the past, and perhaps in Nashville
the gay community has by necessity a retro feel. Walking into a gay bar and finding that
everyone wants to talk, wants to know your story and buy you a drink, that
there is a gay bar, restaurant, book store and café all on the one street at
the centre of a vibrant cultural scene of artists and poets, I don’t know
Nashville but I have been a gay man in both “small town” and “big city” UK and
I have never come across any where that had this kind of haven on offer.
But we must put these two gaps to one side,
they are the context but not the substance – the substance it turns out has
very little to do with being gay and an awful lot to do with being Christian. The new Bishop of Winchester is busy seeking
a vision for our diocese and is in the process championing Tom Wright’s book How
God became King – from all that I have heard about it Bishop Tom is on the same
lines as our Tim – perhaps he should give living as a gay man a go and see how
it strengthens his vision (or perhaps not…).
The point of both books is that the Church loves labels, love the them
and us divide, love being right and pointing out to everyone else that they are
wrong, and at the end of the day when you add it all up the Church loves hate. To admit this is to acknowledge that the
Church this has very very little to do with an authentic witness and encounter
with Jesus. Jesus in not a “them and us”
kind of a guy – Jesus loves only one thing - love itself. To be authentically Christian is to delight
in humanity, in all its weird and wonderful guises. It is to celebrate the fact that we see in a
glass darkly, and others may be seeing something else just as well in their own
glass – the very second that we start to think we have all the answers the
truth has departed from us.
One really interesting part of the book is
after Tim has got over his homophobia and loves his new Gay friends he finds he
has a major problem with the Church and with Christians. He comes to see he has
exchanged one set of prejudice for another, and so then has to journey on to a
place where, while still disagreeing with those Christians would are anti-Gay,
he is able to love them. He radically underlines this point by visiting the Westboro Baptist Church - he challenges us that until with can see that God loves the Phelps and we need to love them too we haven't understood the love of God. However much we
dislike someone’s attitudes, beliefs, and/or behaviour there is no get out
clause to love. As the Church of England
come to the final round of debates on Women Bishops this challenge to love
across the divide has not been lived up to.
I struggle to engage with the organisations which are promoting the
places of women and gay people within the Church because I have increasingly
seen them as being unable to love across the divide. The demonising of Forward in Faith, the
joyful celebrations when some of our brothers and sisters left for the
Ordinariate – none of this spoke of love.
To often these groups have turned to the dark arts of political lobbying
rather than the honest declaration of truth to move their position forward – it
is never enough to claim that ends justify means - it is not enough to pay lip service to love we must act like we love people to.
This is a powerful book despite itself, it
is heavy on dialogue but much of it is clunky – maybe people talk clunkily in Nashville I don’t know –
but there are times when it is a struggle to continue to suspend disbelief. It could also have done with a better proof
reading (but who am I to talk…).
That going to Church is such a part of
normality is another gap, Tim is writing in a Church going society where as
that great Ecumemist of our time, Dolly Parton, said in Steel Magnolias “God
doesn’t mind what Church you go to, so long as ya turn up”.
Here in the UK, however much it might
disappoint me to admit it, Church going is just not normal – it is not even
normal among self defining Christians let alone the population at large. This means that the denial of a place for Gay
people within Church is a much bigger social issue there than is actually is
for us – if “society” goes to Church and if you are not welcome in Church then,
inter alia, you are not welcome in society while for us Church going is
marginal and so the denial of a place for gay people is to denial them a seat
at the margins, and seat nobody can really understand why we have a real desire
for anyway.
This is an important book, but I doubt many
of the people for whom it could be so important will read it – it will end up
(to use an American phrase) preaching to the choir. Part of the reason it won’t
be read be the right people is because it is positive about being Gay – in a
way I wish it was able to talk about all the important stuff about how
Christians don’t have a monopoly of truth and how their calling is to Love not
hate and condemn without it being about being Gay and therefore being beyond
the pale for those who most need it – but sadly this is always the way.
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