As AIDS burst into public view in the early 1980s, some Christian leaders saw the epidemic as God’s righteous judgment. In the epidemic’s early, harrowing years, little was known about the cause or treatment of this mysterious virus, only that it was mostly hitting gay and bisexual men, who were dying in droves. It looked as if sexual promiscuity, routinely condemned in Christian circles, had finally wreaked its long predicted catastrophe on American civilization. Or as Falwell put it, “AIDS is not just God’s punishment for homosexuals. It is God’s punishment for the society that tolerates homosexuals.”43 In the panic surrounding the disease, some hospitals refused to treat infected patients, funeral home directors were afraid of embalming their bodies, and many dentists would not see gay men even for a routine teeth cleaning. The epidemic itself fired up further hatred of the LGBT community, and gay rights organizations reported increased homophobia, discrimination, and attacks on gay people. Ryan White, a teenage hemophiliac who contracted HIV from a blood transfusion, was banned from his Indiana middle school and mercilessly shunned by local citizens, people on the street reportedly shouting, “We know you’re queer,” at him on a regular basis. The toleration of gay people, with their supposed lifestyle of disorderly and unrestrained sex, seemed to have brought America under siege, and these swaths of conservative Christians were determined to shift course.44 Repeated talk that the United States was under siege generated widespread fear and anger that had material effects: in the mid-1980s, LGBT rights and AIDS organizations testified before Congress about rising anti-gay violence at local, state, and national levels.
In 1986, the fundamentalist leader David Noebel coauthored one of the most infamous anti-gay manifestos published in the United States, Special Report: AIDS, which was revised and expanded in 1987. Summit Ministries distributed both versions of the book, each filled with so-called research compiled by Paul Cameron of the Family Research Institute and listing as a third coauthor the white supremacist Wayne C. Lutton.45 Patrick Buchanan, then the White House director of communications in the Reagan administration, praised the book in a back-cover blurb, affirming, “In a healthy society, [homosexuality] will be contained, segregated, controlled and stigmatized.” The book opened by telling readers that AIDS “has the potential of destroying our society” and condemned the “lobbying by homosexual medical activists” who sought greater help for the diseased while protecting licentious behavior. Deriding liberals for efforts to shield gay people and present “a positive view of homosexuality,” the authors’ position was this: “Homosexuals should cease homosexual conduct, become celibate or change to heterosexuality; the homosexual subculture should be suppressed by being declared illegal under state sodomy laws.” The situation was so dire, in fact, that for the sake of public health and America’s very survival, gay people should be detained in holding camps similar to those used for Japanese Americans during World War II.46
The book’s organization into fifty-two “Recommendations” urged a return to the Bible and the godly model of gender complementarity in which women submit to male authority; a heightened suspicion of the “pro-homosexual news media” and entertainment industries; rejection of the civil rights claims of gay people in such arenas as housing, health insurance, classroom hiring, and adoption; the enforcement and expansion of state laws criminalizing sodomy; denial of US citizenship to “all alien homosexuals and sexual deviates” and deportation of any aliens found to have AIDS; and the testing of all homosexuals for AIDS every thirty days, with AIDS-positive persons quarantined from the public and forced to disclose their AIDS status in health-care cards and driver’s licenses. As recommendation forty-two more or less summarized, “Homosexuals are advised to return quietly and hastily to their closets and cease all homosexual activity.” But even these recommendations might not be enough, the authors reflected. Hence, “we may have to think of forcefully exiling all AIDS-carriers and sexually active homosexuals who feel they must continue to practice ‘the gay life.’” Detention, quarantine, and deportation: rapid and final action was essential.47
These forms of anti-gay messaging and the activism that went with them continued into the 1990s and beyond, as the Christian right continued to battle the loosening of anti-gay laws and cultural attitudes. After the Hawaii Supreme Court issued a 1993 ruling that the state marriage law did not limit marriage to male-female couples, the legislature changed the marriage law to institute such a limit. Supporters of traditional marriage around the country got the drift. The Christian right called for marriage protection laws, and in 1996 President Clinton signed the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA), which stipulated that no state rejecting same-sex marriage was required to recognize same-sex marriages performed in other states and defined marriage at the federal level as restricted to a union between one man and one woman, thus denying federal benefits to partners in a same-sex marriage. Given the pressure already exerted on Clinton by Christian right leaders—the Paula Jones lawsuit had been filed two years earlier and was a heavy weight on his presidency at this time—it was significant that Clinton, who had been elected as a supporter of gay rights, felt the need to sign DOMA and thus stem the fury stirred up by the Hawaii case. Once again, the predominant religious voices carrying political heft appeared to be conservative, anti-gay ones.
Meanwhile, these Christian right leaders also saw a growing threat to their cause in popular culture, as more LGBT people were becoming visible. Southern Baptists called for a boycott of the Walt Disney Company in June 1997, asserting that Disney opposed Christian values by offering benefits to employees’ same-sex partners and hosting “Gay Days” convened by LGBT groups. They and others complained when Ellen Degeneres, whose highly rated television sitcom Ellen aired on ABC from 1994 to 1998, came out as a lesbian on Oprah Winfrey’s show in February 1997; her character on the show came out soon afterward. And leaders protested when the sitcom Will and Grace, which featured two gay male lead characters and started airing on NBC in 1998, aired an episode that mocked a show’s character who was the ex-gay leader of a gay reparative ministry. These conservative Christians knew they faced a tidal wave of liberalizing sentiment on homosexuality, and they were determined to resist.
For those mobilized by this message, opposition to homosexuality and opposition to feminism were still hand in glove, and Falwell remained one of the most visible exemplars of this union. He made an especially memorable and revealing statement two days after the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on the United States, saying to Christian broadcaster Pat Robertson: “I really believe that the pagans, and the abortionists, and the feminists, and the gays and the lesbians who are actively trying to make that an alternative lifestyle, the ACLU, People For the American Way, all of them who have tried to secularize America—I point the finger in their face and say ‘you helped this happen.’”48 Falwell stepped back on this statement after receiving heavy criticism and a public rebuke from President George W. Bush, but the uninhibited listing of those he considered enemies of God and the nation revealingly placed feminists and queer people together at its secularizing core: left unchecked, these venal, anti-religious anti-citizens would destroy America.
The animus toward homosexuality in Christian right circles grew with time. As the progressive religious case came into its own with the issue of same-sex marriage, this oppositional contingent remained steadfast in its conviction that homosexuality was the sin of sins, the grossest insult to God’s gendered order. Liberal and progressive Christians had a major fight ahead.
Clergy speak at a press conference to advocate for same-sex marriage, 2004. GREG WAHL-STEVENS, COURTESY OF ASSOCIATED PRESS.
LIBERAL AND PROGRESSIVE CHRISTIANS IN the pews had been growing increasingly open on matters pertaining to homosexuality and LGBT rights. In fact, progressive Christians had been part of the gay rights movement from the outset, at least since the 1964 founding of the Council on Religion and the Homosexual, which incorporated Christians across Protestant denominations joining together w
ith gay activists. Years later, many were still working for changes in their congregations and denominational organizations as well as the broader society.49
Noting that Jesus had said nothing about homosexuality (at least nothing that biblical writers reported) but an awful lot about caring for the poor, the vulnerable, and the outcast in society, Christian progressives had long prioritized such issues as poverty and homelessness over sexual morality. If homosexuality were so terrible, they said now, surely Jesus would have emphasized it, but in fact he spurned the moral authorities of his day as judgmental hypocrites while ministering to the oppressed and afflicted, and he called on his followers to do likewise. Not all religious liberals were yet ready to welcome gay clergy or to celebrate same-sex unions; it would take more time for some to feel comfortable around LGBT people at all. But they were uninterested in, indeed disdainful of, the conservative Christian discourse railing at homosexuality (and feminism) for destroying the nation. Liberal and progressive Catholics, often dismayed at how much emphasis church leaders put on sexual activities, were far less worried about homosexuality (if at all) than their conservative counterparts, and many increasingly supported LGBT rights, including marriage equality.
A year and a half or so after his divorce, Robinson entered into his relationship with Mark Andrew. After some time dating, they made a decision to commit to one another as a couple and as a family, since Andrew would help Robinson raise his two daughters. Robinson very much felt this relationship to be a holy union. He later wrote of his early experience of that partnership: “In a way I had never before experienced, I understood what the prayer book means when it describes marriage as a union ‘in heart, body, and mind.’ I experienced a wholeness and integration between body and spirit I had only dreamed about. I remember thinking, ‘So this is what all the fuss is about! No wonder people like—and hallow—this!’”50 As his own right to marry began to weigh on him, starting in the early 1990s Robinson was among a group of gay Episcopal Church activists who would come to call themselves Claiming the Blessing and contended that the church ought to offer a blessing for same-sex unions. With marriage such a contentious issue, Claiming the Blessing did not even talk about the institution itself but focused on developing a liturgical celebration of same-sex love.51
The Episcopal Church had long talked about gays, lesbians, and bisexuals in a more welcoming way than did fundamentalists like Falwell, Bryant, Noebel, and the LaHayes. As early as 1976, amid the early surge of the conservative Christian anti-gay campaigns, the General Convention of the Episcopal Church proclaimed that “homosexual persons are children of God who have a full and equal claim with all other persons upon the love, acceptance, and pastoral concern and care of the Church.”52 That was also the year, not incidentally, that Episcopal Church leaders approved women’s ordination, after some years of in-fighting. But just as church members and leaders held a wide spectrum of views on women in the priesthood, so too did homosexuality and issues touching it remain divisive. Integrity, an LGBT group within the church that was founded in 1974 and would play an important role in the coming years, had voiced support for same-sex marriage the year before but had upset some church leaders and so curbed public discussion of it for a few years. When, in 1977, the second openly gay person was ordained a priest, there was an outcry at all levels of the church by those who believed that unrepentant homosexual behavior was sin and must never receive church sanction. But when church leaders and delegates at the 1979 General Convention passed a resolution against ordaining a “practicing homosexual, or any person who is engaged in heterosexual relations outside of marriage,” twenty-one bishops signed a “statement of conscience” that opposed this declaration and stated that they could not conform to it because such “would involve a repudiation of our ordination vows as bishops.”53 Arguments over the moral status of homosexuality and its place in the church would continue for years.
As the church was drawn more and more into caring for people with AIDS, attitudes toward LGBT people shifted in a positive direction. In the same year that the National Episcopal AIDS Coalition spawned the provocative “Our Church has AIDS” slogan, the 1988 General Convention featured a display of the famous AIDS quilt in the convention center. Robinson, just two years past his coming out, was there and remembered later that “all but the most hateful visited that [quilt], and of course it’s an incredibly powerful experience.” Bishops, priests, and parishioners all over the country began pressing their congregations to work and minister among people with AIDS living in shelters and those in household or hospice care. Robinson served as the editor of a four-part AIDS curriculum, Youth Ministry in the Age of AIDS, which the church released in 1989, sending copies to every Episcopal congregation. Progressive groups like the Unitarians and Quakers were already laboring intently in this area. But Episcopalians were at the forefront among mainline denominations in committing themselves to people with AIDS—and, by extension, to the broader LGBT community whom the crisis had united.54
So things went for the church during the 1990s and into the early years of the twenty-first century: more discussions, debates, and controversies, with nothing close to consensus on any question pertaining to homosexuality in the church. Many other denominations were also making changes, as were Jewish groups. Most of them had long contained denominational factions devoted to pro-gay advocacy on relevant church policy, and by the mid-1990s institutional resolutions were coming rapidly across a spectrum of responses. In 1996, the Unitarian Universalist Association officially called for full marriage equality, while United Methodist Church leaders voted for a ban on church ceremonies celebrating same-sex unions—Methodists, in fact, were deeply divided on sexual questions for years. In 1997, the General Assembly of the Union of American Hebrew Congregations—then the name of the congregational branch of Reform Judaism—voted to support secular efforts advancing legislation for same-sex civil marriage, as well as religious efforts to develop an appropriate Jewish ceremony for committed same-sex couples. That same year, the Religious Coalition for the Freedom to Marry emerged as a group of more than seven hundred liberal and progressive clergy, congregations, and organizations from twenty-three faith traditions across Massachusetts (mostly Protestant and Reform Jewish). The coalition engaged at a number of levels in support of civil rights for LGBT people. Among other efforts, it submitted an influential brief in a case that would result in state legalization of same-sex marriage: the brief distinguished sharply between the function and meaning of civil marriage versus religious marriage, a distinction that would be cited in the court’s final opinion. Other religious organizations and denominations continued to debate same-sex marriage during this period and landed all over the place on this issue, deliberating as well over questions of whether to support openly LGBT clergy.
Back in the Episcopal Church a blow struck pro-gay forces in 1998, when bishops at the international Lambeth Conference passed a resolution that declared homosexuality to be “incompatible with Scripture.” Claiming the Blessing, with Robinson a founding member, convened with resolve and focus for the purpose of obtaining authorization of a liturgical rite to bless monogamous same-sex couples, authorization the group would seek at the next General Convention in 2003. Leaders made clear that they did not wish to compel any priest to perform such same-sex blessings; they did, however, challenge critics “to stop scapegoating lesbian and gay Christians for every contemporary ill in the church, particularly for our current state of disunity or the potential for the unraveling of the Anglican Communion.” The group met success: delegates to the 2003 General Convention passed a resolution recognizing the differing views within the church about how best to care for LGBT people and maintaining: “local faith communities are operating within the bounds of our common life as they explore and experience liturgies celebrating and blessing same-sex unions.”55 The following year, a commission from the Anglican Church headquarters issued the Windsor Report, which rebuked the Episcopal Church for this statement, s
eeing it as contrary to “the interests of the wider [Anglican] Communion.”56
The utmost challenge to the Episcopal Church’s ability to stay united despite the divisions on sexuality questions had been quietly percolating for a few years: Robinson had felt God calling him to become a bishop, and despite the storm that surrounded his nomination, he felt this to be his true vocation. The election and consecration of a gay bishop constituted a momentous event in the global Anglican Communion and also in American Christianity writ large. It carved a rift so deep in the Episcopal Church that many of those adamantly convinced that the election constituted a breach of gospel truth left for ultra-conservative Anglican organizations. These groups embraced literalist positions on women no less than gay people—moving closer to official Roman Catholic teachings and ever further to the right on gender issues more generally. They held a dim view of Robinson’s election, one worlds apart from the view of his supporters.
To those who departed, Robinson’s election proved that the church had lost its biblical foundations and succumbed to the cultural drift leftward they believed had been brewing since the 1960s sex revolution; teachings on sexuality and Christian marriage, to their minds, were too fundamental for human beings to amend. Whatever the source, for those who equated homosexuality with an attack on Christianity itself, the very idea of a noncelibate gay man rising so high in the Episcopal hierarchy—a permanent member of what the church considers an unbroken succession of bishops stretching back historically to Jesus’s apostles—was a sickening sign of social and ecclesiastical decline. That the leader of the global Anglican Communion, the archbishop of Canterbury, refused to invite Robinson to the triennial Lambeth Conference in which bishops worldwide participate, showed the contentiousness of the international response to his election.57
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