From Sin to Amazing Grace by Patrick S. Cheng

Author:Patrick S. Cheng
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Church Publishing Inc.
Published: 2012-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

2. Sin as the Closet

How should we think about sin in light of the Out Christ? If the Out Christ is understood as the One through whom God most fully reveals Godself to humanity, then sin—defined as what opposes the Out Christ—can be understood as the closet, or the refusal to reveal oneself fully to one’s families, friends, co-workers, and other loved ones.15 Not only does the closet prevent a person from truly connecting with others, but it has a corrosive effect on the self-esteem and well-being to the extent that she is constantly forced to keep her life a secret to others.

As we have seen in recent years, the closet has a particularly toxic effect with respect to conservative Christian religious leaders who preach against same-sex or gender-variant acts and yet are secretly LGBT themselves. We have seen this in the case of Ted Haggard, the evangelical pastor who paid a male escort to give him sexual massages as well as crystal meth. I have written elsewhere about George Rekers, a prominent proponent of reparative therapy and board member of the anti-gay National Association for Research and Therapy of Homosexuality (NARTH), who was found returning from vacation with a male escort whom he had hired from Rentboy.com, allegedly for helping him to lift his luggage.16 And there is the case of Eddie Long, the pastor of a black megachurch who had been accused by four young men of coercing them into sexual acts.17

The closet is also a serious and sinful issue for the Roman Catholic Church. In his book The Silence of Sodom, Mark Jordan has written about the deep closets within Roman Catholicism and the resulting tension between extreme homophobia and homoeroticism within the Roman Catholic priesthood.18 The closet is not limited to homosexuality, however. Elsewhere, Jordan and others have written about the recent sexual abuse crisis in the Roman Catholic Church and the problems that have arisen out of the ecclesial closet and the extreme repression and inability to speak openly and honestly about issues of sexuality.19 Mary Hunt has written about how the Roman Catholic Church is “suffused with secrecy and deception, and rewarding of duplicity.” She writes that the system “works” because of the “collusion of those schooled in obedience to law and authority, who adhere to codes of behavior that preserve the priesthood and the institutional church at the expense of children.”20

The sin of the closet also manifests itself in LGBT communities of color. For many LGBT people of color, coming out to families and friends can be a particularly difficult process as a result of condemnation from theologically conservative churches, cultural expectations of traditional gender roles, and the anxieties of bringing shame to their families and ethnic communities.21 For example, “Michael Kim,” the pseudonym of a young Korean American gay Christian man, has written about the difficulties of coming out in the Korean American community.22 According to Kim: “It is a single-elimination game—I could go to Harvard, Harvard Medical, do a surgical residency at Massachusetts General Hospital, and if in the end, I am still gay, I end up with a big fat zero.

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