How to Begin When Your World Is Ending by Molly Phinney Baskette

Author:Molly Phinney Baskette [Baskette, Molly Phinney]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: SEL032000 SELF-HELP / Spiritual, REL012120 RELIGION / Christian Living / Spiritual Growth, BIO026000 BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY / Personal Memoirs
Publisher: Broadleaf Books

Chapter 8

The Sin of Certainty

Close your eyes. See in your mind the homeless shelter for young adults ages sixteen to twenty-five nearest your home. Nearly half of the young people staying there, trying to rebuild their lives, are LGBTQ+. This doesn’t even count the young adults not in shelter: those living on the streets or trading sex for a safer place to sleep. They are living rough for one primary reason: their fundamentalist parents banished them when they came out as queer. Their parents chose the cult of evangelical Christianity over their own children.

Banishment doesn’t always result in homelessness. Exile can take many forms, including emotional and spiritual. In Somerville, our church was becoming known as a haven for young queer people who were deconstructing faith, but still loved God and the trappings of church. They craved its structure and support, as well as the chosen family they found there—and appreciated not just the acceptance but also the radical affirmation they found for who God had made them to be.

Isabella, Shanice, and Adam were still in an uneasy détente with their birth parents. Mom and Dad hadn’t cut off their college tuition, and still welcomed them home for holiday meals, but the message was clear: I don’t approve of you, and neither does God. Occasionally, some of those parents would wander cautiously into our sanctuary at their kids’ invitation. They were surprised to see traditional pews, dark wood paneling, and a fairly conventional young straight mom wearing a black academic robe and stole rather than a bacchanalia of naked pagans worshipping goddesses (though that sounds fun).

At coffee hour, I sometimes took it upon myself to go over the antigay “clobber texts” of the Bible with those parents, trying to loosen up their sense of certainty in God and His judgments. I cited context for Deuteronomy, Leviticus, Romans, and I Corinthians, and noted that Jesus had hard words for those who judge and exclude others, but didn’t have a thing to say about “the gays.” I’m not sure my words did much good since earnest coffee-hour arguments don’t usually break hard hearts or bend stiff necks. What does that is relationship, over time: a parent deciding to let their natural love rather than ideology win. But I hoped that words from an ally, and one with some religious authority, would be a little shovel into stony soil, breaking it up and preparing it for a new idea to sprout.

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