Religion and LGBTQ Sexualities

Critical Essays

Stephen Hunt

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781351905084
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Théologie et religion
• Subtopic: Religion

This compiled and edited collection engages with a theme which is increasingly attracting scholarly attention, namely, religion and LGBTQ sexuality. Each section of the volume provides perspectives to understanding academic discourse and wide-ranging debates around LGBTQ sexualities and religion and spirituality. The collection also draws attention to aspects of religiosity that shape the lived experiences of LGBTQ people and shows how sexual orientation forges dimensions of faith and spirituality. Taken together the essays represent an exploration of contestations around sexual diversity in the major religions; the search of sexual minorities for spiritual 'safe spaces' in both established and new forms of religiosity; and spiritual paths formed in reconciling and expressing faith and sexual orientation. This collection, which features contributions from a number of disciplines including sociology, anthropology, psychology, history, religious studies and theology, provides an indispensable teaching resource for educators and students in an era when LGBTQ topics are increasingly finding their way onto numerous undergraduate, post-graduate and profession orientated programmes.

Part I

Discourses and Discontents

[1]

The Centrality of Marriage

Homosexuality and the Roman Catholic Argument

James P. Hanigan

• James P. Hanigan is professor of moral theology, Duquesne University, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA. He is the author of Homosexuality: The Test Case for Christian Sexual Ethics (Paulist, 1988).

It is surely inadvisable, if not impossible, to address the issues of sexual orientation and homosexual behaviour independently of one’s more general theological and moral views about human sexuality and sexual behaviour. Certainly the Roman Catholic tradition has not done so. I will therefore proceed in this essay in three stages. First, I will indicate the sources of Roman Catholic moral thought and how I understand the teaching about human sexuality which was developed by the historical tradition from those sources,¹ with special attention to sexual orientation and/or preference and sexual conduct. Second, I will explain the moral stance which the Roman Catholic community, through its official teachers,² has taken on the issues of homosexual orientation and conduct at this time in history. Finally, I will touch briefly on the implications of this official teaching for the rights of homosexual persons in both church and state.³

The sources of Roman Catholic moral thought

The Roman Catholic community has a lengthy, rather complex tradition of thought in regard to sexual morality.⁴ The Bible, the primary narrative and fundamental normative source⁵ for the church’s own self-understanding and ethical practice, as well as for its relationship to the larger society, has considerable material for reflection and appropriation on the subject of human sexual behaviour. Starting with the two creation stories in the opening chapters of Genesis (Gen. 1:28; 2:18–24),⁶ and including a variety of narratives found in the historical books (e.g., Gen. 19:1–14; 34:1–5; 38:1–26; 39:1–20; Ruth 4; 2 Sam. 11–12:15; 1 Kings 11:1–13; Tob. 8:1–21), the holiness codes in Leviticus (ch. 18, esp. v.22), the ten commandments (Ex. 20:14,17), the Song of Songs and the practical moral advice of the wisdom literature (Pss 127 and 128; Prov. 5; 31:10–31; Eccl. 9:9–10), and the prophetic analogy between marriage and the Israelite covenant with God (Isa. 54:4–10; Ezek. 16; Hos. 1–3; Mal. 2:10–16), the Old Testament is thought to shed considerable light on marriage and family as central to the divine purpose for human sexuality and its responsible uses in relation to God’s covenant with Israel.

The New Testament is likewise eloquent in its testimony to marriage and family as the embodiment of the divine purpose for human sexuality and its proper use in light of the already and not-yet present kingdom of God proclaimed in and by Jesus the Christ. The gospel passages on marriage and divorce (Matt. 5:31–32; 19:1–9; Mark 10:1–12; Luke 16:18), on sexual desires (Matt. 5:27–30), and on celibacy for the sake of the kingdom of God (Matt. 19:10–12) are all taken with great seriousness in the Roman Catholic tradition. The Pauline instructions on licit and illicit sexual behaviour (1 Cor. 6:12–7:40), as well as the great Pauline analogy of the mystery of Christ’s union with the church to the human marital union (Eph. 5:21–33) are prominent among New Testament passages which provide fuller insight into the divine plan for human well-being and the gospel call to holiness in regard to sexual activity.

In addition, within the Roman Catholic community its saints,⁷ its theologians, its pastors and official teachers, as well as its members, have continued over the many years of the church’s life to reflect upon the meaning and value of human sexuality. This reflection has proceeded with faith in the continued guidance of the Holy Spirit and in light of both the community’s ongoing engagement with the biblical witness and new knowledge about the human person and the ever-changing social conditions in which people struggle to make sense of and live out their sexual desires and relationships.⁸

Since for most of recorded history nothing seems to have been known about what today we somewhat ambiguously call sexual orientation,⁹ it is only in the present century that we can expect to find anything relevant in Roman Catholic teaching about the orientation itself. Historically, same-sex conduct between both males and females was known both within and outside the biblical world.¹⁰ It was assumed, as far as we can tell, to be a choice of the individuals who engaged in such behaviour, although in giving their consent to it they may well have been seen to be yielding to the prompting of evil spirits.¹¹ In the Roman Catholic tradition, but certainly not only there, same-sex behaviour was judged to be unnatural and to be condemned as such in Scripture. So, when voluntarily chosen, it was sinful, and the grounds for that judgment were thought to be quite clear from both revelation and reason.

Such a view is understandable, coming as it does from a tradition that understood Genesis, Matthew, Paul and the natural law to teach that the normative setting for human sexual activity is marriage and that the primary purpose of human sexuality as created by God is the well-being of the human species.¹² Sexuality was regarded in the first instance as a biological and social reality. The good of human sexuality was understood to be first and foremost a social good – the establishment of a stable family for the procreation and education of children. Thomas Aquinas (to offer but one instance from the tradition) put forth as his primary rational argument for sexual monogamy and the indissolubility of marriage the consideration that such conditions were essential to marriage in order to promote that social good. Sex required marriage, and marriage required monogamy and indissolubility to ensure the appropriate environment, the stable family, for the proper birthing and rearing of children.¹³

The interest of other social bodies, namely the church and the state, in the natural, social institutions of marriage and family, and so indirectly in the sexual practices of individuals, arose precisely out of its interest in and responsibility for the proper social ordering of family life to serve the common good of society and the well-being of its next generation of members or citizens.¹⁴

Thus sexual activity which took place outside the context of marriage, contravened its procreative purpose or sought other goods of sexuality to the intentional exclusion of the social good were on the face of it in contradiction to the divine purpose for sex, because they were in violation of the obvious, divinely created, social nature of sexuality and the natural end of sexual intercourse.¹⁵ Hence they were judged to be unreasonable, to be motivated at least in part by lust, to be harmful to the stability and well-being of the family and so to be objectively sinful.

Because the social good of sexual activity was of great moment to human life – it had, after all, to do with the very existence and continued well-being of one’s family, tribe or clan and nation, and indeed the entire human species – to use one’s sexual powers in contradiction to the divine purpose, in ways that would exclude, frustrate or hurt the social good, was always a serious matter. To do so knowingly and deliberately was therefore judged to be a grave or mortal sin.

This narrative-based account of human sexual morality had, in the first place, nothing to do with perceptions of sexual behaviour as animalistic, as dirty or shameful. It had nothing to do with judgments that sex was unworthy of God and of creatures made in God’s image and likeness, or that sexual pleasure was somehow base and beneath human dignity. The Genesis creation stories did not allow such a view of what God had created, nor did the New Testament affirmations of marriage. Such negative perceptions of and judgments about human sexual desire, sexual pleasure and sexual conduct – and I do not deny that such perceptions and judgments are to be found too frequently in the tradition of which I write¹⁶ – followed upon prior understandings of the highest purpose of human life, union with God, and the divinely intended purpose of sex. Given the demand for holiness of life, taken in conjunction with the daily experience of the difficulty of disciplining human sexuality to serve this noble and lofty end, it is not surprising that sexual desire and lust became confused and often identified.¹⁷

This tradition of which I write is, after all, a tradition which steadfastly insisted on the natural, created goodness of marriage as an embodied, sexual relationship – in the face of many severe attacks by those who claimed a higher wisdom, a more genuine spirituality.¹⁸ It is a tradition that insisted that marriage is in origin not a human invention but of divine institution,¹⁹ that the right to marry is a natural human right not subject to arbitrary definition or limitation by family, state or church.²⁰ It is a tradition that fought vigorously to establish the free, mutual consent of the marital partners as the very essence and heart of the marital covenant;²¹ a tradition that learned to regard marriage as a privileged vehicle of grace, a sacrament and a vocation, than which no higher accolade could be paid;²² and a tradition that could defend the practice of deliberately chosen consecrated celibacy and virginity only as a supernatural calling or gift.²³ It was a tradition which was continually informed by St Paul, who had advised married couples to abstain from sexual relations only to foster directly their relationship with God (1 Cor. 7:5), and then only for a time and by mutual consent, and which regarded marriage as a remedy for concupiscence, not an indulgence of or a licence for lust. It was also a tradition, let it be said, that found the primary social location of women to be in the home and women’s primary social function to be largely exhausted by the role either of mother or consecrated virgin.²⁴

Nor was the manifest intractability of the human sexual drive to reasoned argument, moral persuasion and virtuous control seen as possible evidence against this understanding of sexuality and the consequent judgments about proper sexual behaviour. In the first place there were conspicuous examples of men and women, both celibate and married, who by the grace of God had overcome the disorder of their sexual desires and had learned to live chaste lives in which they loved wisely and well. Second, it was a point of doctrine that the sexual drive and human sexual desires, like all other human drives and desires, had been disordered by sin. Lust, one of the seven deadly sins, was all too real. Human beings were in a constant moral struggle with themselves: they had to learn to control, shape and direct all their natural drives and desires in ways that accorded with the divine purpose. They had to learn, with the help of God’s grace and the guidance and support of their familial and ecclesial communities, to live lives of virtue in order to love one another. That was what the moral life was all about. Human beings, apart from the grace of God, were enslaved to sin. And the enslavement of human beings to the disordered power of their own sexuality, to lust, was but one sign – albeit a rather common, widespread and evident one – of that enslavement to sin and of the continuing power of concupiscence even in the lives of the baptized. The power of concupiscence,²⁵ to be sure, had many other and more destructive manifestations than improper sexual conduct. But given the operative understanding of sexuality and the divine purpose for it, homosexual behaviour was simply one of the more unusual and serious of these manifestations.

Within this account of the meaning and purpose of human sexuality and of the importance of the institutions of marriage and family to social well-being and personal holiness, there was a role for the state. In general terms, and in light of the principle of subsidiarity,²⁶ the institutions of marriage and the family were judged to have both a natural priority to and an independence from the state. This gave marriage and the family as social institutions certain rights over against the state.²⁷ At the same time, marriage as a social institution was naturally ordered to family, and the family had a need for the state in order to be able to fulfill its own function as family. Hence a natural basis existed for the moral duty of the state legally to recognize, encourage, regulate and protect, but not define or claim final authority over,²⁸ the institutions of marriage and family. There was also its more negative responsibility to discourage illegitimacy, divorce and other forms of immorality, such as adultery and homosexual behaviour, which might threaten the well-being of marriage and the family.

It is of course necessary to move from these more formal obligations of the state to promote and protect the institutions of marriage and family to specific policies and laws. That move was mediated in part by the principle of toleration.²⁹ Briefly expressed, the principle recognizes that not all sins should be crimes and have legal sanctions attached to them. Some immoral acts are rightly tolerated by the state if the social cost of trying to prevent them would be morally disproportionate to the good that could be achieved by efforts at prevention. For instance, both Augustine and Aquinas in their times judged that the social cost of governmental efforts to abolish prostitution would be excessively high; thus the practice could be tolerated by the state without being blessed or approved.³⁰

Twentieth-century developments

Such was the unfolding tradition of Roman Catholic thought about human sexuality for 1900 years. It is essential now, as a second step, to explore 20th-century developments in the Roman Catholic understanding of sexuality and sexual behaviour.³¹

Along with many of their fellow human beings, Roman Catholic theologians have come to recognize (with little or no thanks to theology) that there is a reality appropriately called a sexual orientation,³² and to understand that one’s sexual orientation, whatever it may be and however it comes to b...