Gene Robinson and the Gay Jesus

The other night I was suffering from an eye infection and was thus up late enough to watch The Daily Show, which for those keeping tabs, airs at 10 p.m. Stewart's guest on the program was Gene Robinson, the gay Episcopalian bishop from New Hampshire. (I encourage you to watch the video here to be able to understand what I have to say.) Robinson always struck me as a genuine gay man, but not much of a genuine Christian. He believes in a feel good God who wants us to be happy on our own terms, and has therefore constructed a theology that tells him that is also what the Bible says. (Note: there are plenty of other Christians, including myself, who often do the same thing.) For those who have read it, it doesn't say that or even imply it anywhere. Bonhoeffer said that when Christ calls a man he bids him come and die, and that is about as good of a synopsis as I have heard.

One wonders, listening to Robinson, if he has actually read the Bible. He attributes the following statement to holy writ in the interview: where love is, there is God also. Now, don't get me wrong, I am a huge Tolstoy fan, but so far as I know, he was not one of the canonical authors.

Now, I don't really want to write about gay marriage here for two reasons: the topic is far too vast and I have far too many conflicting feelings to squeeze it into a blog post, and secondly, what jumped out in this interview to me wasn't Robinson's attempt to bravely face the applause of our nation's elites, but the way he talked about Jesus at the end of the interview.

I will make one brief comment before passing on to Robinson's idea that Jesus himself might have been gay. When we talk about love we need to decide if what we mean by love is also what the Bible means by love. Simply put, is God's definition of love the same as ours? I would argue that for most people the answer to this question is no. Therefore, when Robinson and Stewart pile on the Christians who use Leviticus to argue for the stoning of homosexuals (who are these people, anyway; seriously, who in the last 30 years has used Leviticus to argue the Bible's case on homosexuality?), arguing that they need to contextualize the words of Scripture, I would tell them that they need to do the same thing. Do a word study on love and see if "doing whatever I feel, as long as I really feel it, is right" seems to be the scriptural definition.

The worst part of the video for me is the implication that because Jesus hung out with a bunch of dudes--the Bible even says he loved one!--then he must be gay. Of course, Robinson does the whole throw-up-my-hands, I'm-not-saying-this-but-if-I-were-this-is-what-I-would-say thing, but he is none too subtle here. And nothing to me shows how culturally derived Robinson's view of sexuality and masculinity is. 

One of the most revelatory moments of my life was when I was thinking about friendship, particularly with my best friend. And I thought about how much like romantic love it was. I love talking to him, miss him when we're apart for long periods of time as we invariably are, spend all my time with him just talking over our whiskey, call him on the phone (a rarity for me), I even tell him that I love him. If someone were writing a book about me, it would not be outlandish to call Casey the one I love. Of course I love other people, lots and lots of other people, but there is something particular about my love for him. The only difference, of course, and it's a big one, is that I don't want to have sex with him. He's a good looking guy, but it's just not there. 

Our culture doesn't really make room for relationships like this. If a person with a certain disposition read the preceding paragraph, they would attribute my reluctance to have sex with my friend as evidence of my repressed desire for him. Repression, while certainly real, becomes a convenient club to swing for people inclined to do so. These are the people for whom everyone opposed to gay marriage is actually a closeted homosexual.

Male friendship is not valued in our culture and where it exists it is so completely watered down that it barely qualifies as friendship. I remember once, walking with my arm around a friend, praying together before he left for the Army, and a couple of guys drove by and called us faggots. This reduction of physical affection flowing from friendship to sexual desire is part of what fragmented our culture so heavily against gays in the 1940s and 1950s. Which makes it odd that a gay man is now utilizing this gross reduction to argue that Jesus just might have been gay. Robinson, having imbibed this cultural construction of male friendship, sees no way for an alternative to be possible. Every close male relationship is therefore suspect. And that, apart from being blasphemous (ah, that old word), is also very sad.