I’d like to dedicate my learning today to my current students in Queering Religion, who inspire my calling with their daily courage to be their authentic selves.
For most of history and still in many places, even here in San Francisco, being gay or lesbian, bisexual and transgender, non-binary and gender non-conforming has been deemed unnatural, immoral and or criminal. The Abrahamic faith traditions, Judaism, Christianity and Islam are largely to blame. Religious teachers, preachers and parishioners have cherry picked biblical and scriptural verses to create a false myth of “God versus Gay” [Jay Michaelson, God Vs. Gay?: The Religious Case for Equality]. But “God versus Gay isn’t just a false dichotomy. It’s a rebellion against the image of God itself.” This is among the most pervasive and hurtful untruths in America and around the globe today, and people all across the ideological spectrum continue to believe it.
Religious-based hatred for gays and lesbians, transgender and gender non-conforming people is a historic injustice that continues to wreak emotional and spiritual havoc on people of all ages. Having worked in LGBTQ religious communities for more than two decades, I’ve met thousands of people wounded by what they see as a conflict between religion and LGBTQ identity. It’s unsurprising that many LGBTQ identified people have given up on religion – religion gave up on them first.
In my Queering Religion classroom, I hear the stories of our students who have been made to feel less than fully human. Young people consider suicide as a means to escape the pain and shame which religious authorities, teachers, parents, texts, dogma, doctrines, politicians, priests, rabbis and imams spew, preach, legislate and dictate in order to destroy lives.
Queering Religion in the classroom as well as in our University Ministry co-curricular programs is intended to transform hearts and minds offering a measure of healing and a sense of community to those who’ve experienced trauma from religious-based homophobia and transphobia.
Today, we gather with friends from across faith traditions and belief systems. This juicy spring season with its various festival days has been busy for many of us with Easter, Ramadan, Eid and Passover all occurring within days of each other and some overlapping, as they do.
At our Passover observance last week here on campus, my colleagues, Rev. Dr. Ronné Sims, Glendy Alvarez, and I, along with 150+ students, read from our AntiRacism Passover Haggadah and told the story of our enslavement in Egypt and our Exodus “from darkness to great light.”
We reminded ourselves that with freedom comes responsibility. Freedom equals responsibility. Being free, we are responsible for resolving injustices everywhere, until all people are free.
To be free means we have choices and we can make these choices freely, without coercion. I think most of us gathered here are confronted every day with almost limitless choices for how to behave, what kind of work to do, how to spend our money and time. In the face of these limitless possibilities, how often do we tend to shy away, to make predictable decisions, not to rock the boat, to settle for the comfortable, to avoid responsibility?
Particularly in the context of an unjust world, we often seek to avoid accepting agency and responsibility. We act as though we are slaves to efficiency and productivity; to fashion and consumerism; to money, power and ambition.
Dr. King’s sermon “Transformed NonConformist” calls us to find the courage and integrity to break away from the habits of comfort and convenience. Dr. King wants to interrupt us and redirect us from just going along with the status quo; he wants us to stop conforming to that which is unjust. To transform our thinking and end our conforming ways and become radical nonconformists, as exemplified for him by Jesus.
Originally titled “Mental and Spiritual Slavery,” this sermon was composed during Dr. King’s early years assisting his father at Ebenezer Church in Montgomery and delivered first in 1954. As he developed his thinking, he delivered this message in various forms during his career with the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. And in 1963 published the sermon with the title, “Transformed Nonconformist.”
King’s words are as relevant and compelling today as when he preached them nearly seven decades ago.
In his remarks, King observes, “I have seen many white people, who sincerely oppose segregation and discrimination, but they never took a real stand against it because of fear of standing alone.”
King maintains that the church’s sanction of social evils, such as race discrimination and economic exploitation demonstrate that it has “more often conformed to the authority of the world than to the authority of God.”
King chastises the church’s tendency to retreat “behind the isolated security of stained-glass windows” and rebukes ministers who “have joined the enticing cult of conformity.” “Nowhere is the tragic tendency to conform more evident than in the church, an institution that has served to crystallize, conserve and even bless the patterns of majority opinion.”
King warns that “nonconformity is always costly” and “may mean losing your job.”
In Dr. King’s words, “Success, recognition and conformity are the bywords of the modern world where everyone seems to crave the anesthetizing security of being identified with the majority.”
“We are called to be people of conviction, not conformity; of moral nobility, not social respectability. We are commanded to live differently and according to a higher loyalty.’
King continues, “In spite of this imperative to live differently, we are producing a generation of mass-mind. We have moved from the extreme of rugged individualism to the even greater extremism of rugged collectivism.”
Particularly poignant for me, he writes “Many people fear nothing more terribly than to take a position which stands out sharply and clearly from the prevailing opinion.”
Yes, yes, I can resonate with this discomfort and fear of “standing out sharply.” And many of my LGBTQ+ students face discomfort and fear far more frequently and severely than I do. To be their authentic selves, using their authentic names and their authentic pronouns more often than not puts them at great risk with their families, faith communities, employers and co-workers. Four months into this new year and statistics are already showing an increase in hate crimes perpetrated against trans and non-binary, gender non-conforming people.
Still, I do know what it feels like to be a nonconformist and to stand out as the other and go against the social constructs that have controlled us for millenia.
As a Jew living in a society dominated by Christian hegemony, and more specifically as a Jewish, queer, woman, studied, trained and seasoned as a rabbi, teaching in a Catholic context, in which women cannot become priests and out queer, gay and lesbian and transgender teachers can be fired from their teaching positions under the ministerial exception, I am a fine example of our university’s mission.
In a world where the majority of people identify as straight, and heteronormativity is the dominant culture, I learn to live with and navigate the dissonance between what I experience and know to be true and the way the world sees me and treats me.
Dr. King criticizes in his sermon, “The answer of certain psychologists to all maladjusted people is simply to learn to conform to this world. If we only dress and act and think like other people, than we shall be happy and mentally healthy.” But King says he does not want to be well- adjusted to such thinking.
I know what it is to be misgendered.
I haven’t worn a dress in two decades – except that one time when I was in drag.
How I choose to wear my hair and dress up with a necktie seems to rattle people because I don’t conform to the dress codes that make it easy for people to label me. As a white cisgender woman, I have a certain amount of privilege to choose how I perform my gender. I’m not too scared to be out and about gender bending and cross dressing. But many people are.
In Tennessee they just made it illegal.
When we Jews hear of social injustices, such as bills that would make it legal to deny trans people in movie theaters, restaurants, hotels and other public spaces, we are instructed by the Torah to take action to preserve both human dignity and our values.
Religious communities have unique responsibility in preventing feelings of isolation and rejection that are the largest contributors to suicide. In Queering Religion, we acknowledge the damage and destruction that religious-based homophobia and transphobia have caused throughout history. We look at the current ways the Catholic Church continues to teach, permit and legislate hurtful ideas that destroy lives. It feels scary for me to point this out and call attention to it while teaching here at USF. At times, I feel like a rude guest.
I am very grateful for the privilege of academic freedom which I enjoy here. I am aware that my outright Jewish thinking is not in sync with Christian theology and yet we have a robust program in Jewish Studies and Social Justice.
Dr. King urges us not to conform to the unjust tropes of our society, not to go along with the status quo and pretend not to see the inequalities of our society but to challenge authority when the authority is racist, transphobic, homophobic, misogynist and or antisemitic.
My favorite rabbi to quote, Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, was a contemporary of Dr. King, a colleague and friend, and an accomplice to Dr. King in every good way. Heschel is one of several rabbis often portrayed marching alongside Dr. King. Heschel described the meaning of sin in Jewish terms, “What is sin? A failure to respond to God’s challenge. The root of sin is callousness, hardness of heart, lack of understanding, what is at stake in being alive.” Heschel goes on “… There is an evil which most of us condone and are even guilty of: indifference to evil. We remain neutral, impartial and not easily moved by the wrongs done unto other people. Indifference to evil is more insidious than evil itself; it is more universal, more contagious, more dangerous. … God is not indifferent to evil! God is always concerned.”
And with whom is God always concerned?
Hear the words from the Hebrew Bible, those of the prophet Isaiah that Dr. King quotes, “Learn to do good. Devote yourself to justice; Aid the wronged. Uphold the rights of the orphan. Defend the cause of the widow. Come let us reach an understanding – says God.”
I would offer that among the most wronged in today’s society are transgender, women of color.
In a student group I advise called Q-munity, we meet every week in the Romero Room, thirty people strong, for Breaking Bread and the Binary. My gender non-conforming students describe their vulnerability. And they worry for those college students in less liberal places all across the country who don’t have the privilege or option of gender-neutral housing. They are scared of what’s happening and of what could be coming.
They are aware of the anti-trans theology being crafted and disseminated as instanced by the new document from the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) that aims to stop gender-affirming care at Catholic healthcare institutions.
Jamie Manson, president of Catholics for Choice, described the document as “outrageously transphobic” in a statement reported on by The Washington Post. Manson stated, “The USCCB’s so-called “moral criteria” directing Catholic hospitals to refuse to provide transgender patients with gender-affirming healthcare is anything but moral — it is an attack on basic human rights, an affront to Catholic social justice values, and with 1 in 6 U.S. hospital beds housed in Catholic hospitals, a very real threat to the lives, health, and well-being of transgender, non-binary, and gender-expansive patients.”
Marianne Duddy-Burke, executive director of DignityUSA, an organization working on behalf of LGBTQ+ Catholics, “It seems clear that this directive’s goal is to impose long-standing and outdated Catholic doctrine on people with critical medical needs, in violation of the very goals the bishops have outlined for Catholic health care. We urge a very different approach that begins with listening to and trusting the validity of transgender and nonbinary people’s experiences, as well as the testimony of their families, and the expertise of medical professionals who have overseen the care of these individuals. We believe that such an approach will help make the exceptional Catholic health care providers across our country more capable of supporting all of those they are called to serve.”
Before concluding I want to give a shout out to a new student org that I advise here at USF, Queer Safety and Education in Nursing, (QSEN). The founders, students from my spring class in Queering Religion, are young scholar activists and are exploring the intersections of being queer and trans and nursing students in a Jesuit university that must wrestle with the doctrine of the church.
Dr. King would celebrate these students, as these words spoken near the end of his sermon reveal, “The hope of a secure and livable world lies with disciplined nonconformists who are dedicated to justice, peace, and brotherhood. The trailblazers in human, academic, scientific, and religious freedom have always been with non-conformists. In any cause that concerns the progress of mankind, put your faith in the nonconformist!”
In the end, Dr. King “recognizes that social change will not come overnight, yet one works as though it is an imminent possibility. … This hour in history needs a dedicated circle of transformed nonconformists.” Here too, I find resonance with an early third century C.E. Jewish source compiled at the time of the Mishnah, The Ethics of Our Fathers, -Pirkei Avot, “It is not your duty to complete the work; not up to you to finish it. But neither are you free to desist from it.”
Let us give thanks for this day.
