I said:
Here's something for discussion -
Is the general Christian rejection of homosexuality driving gay people into Neopaganism?
I'm new here, checking the place out because I was invited to link my website to the listings on the site. It looks pretty interesting so far.
I'm wanting to reply because (a) I'm a bi Pagan, and (b) I do a lot of interfaith work in the queer community where I live.
I do believe that the fundamentalist rejection of homosexuality and other non-hetero expressions of sexuality is driving people away from Christianity. Yes, there are a lot of queerfolk in Pagan religions (no, we're not all Wiccan). I don't think, though, that queerfolk are specifically fleeing into Paganisms, but rather many are simply rejecting all religion/spirituality. The attitude I see in the queer communities here is that religion itself is an enemy, and that anyone who practices a religion is joining with that enemy. It has been said repeatedly in our communities, by many people, that it's easier to come out as queer in your church than it is to come out as spiritual in the queer community.
That said, as others here in this forum have observed, there are quite a number of queer-friendly Christian churches, synagogues, and other mainstream religious organizations. Granted, these tend to be found in cities. Rural queerfolk are often left without recourse if they wish to stay within the faith they were raised in. Some of these folks do turn to Pagan religions, but I suspect they might have turned to them anyway, simply because different aspects of mainstream monotheism didn't speak to them. I know it wasn't my sexuality that drove me out of Christianity, but rather my dissatisfaction with Christianity as I knew it -- its attitudes toward women, the earth, society, and equal rights for all. I was horrified by the idea that anyone who was a good person but did not believe in a certain particular way was doomed to an eternity of torment. I actually searched for many years before I found paths that satisfied me spiritually, and have spent many of those years building a way of relating to the Gods and Goddesses and to the Spirits and Ancestors that expresses my true feelings and satisfies my spiritual cravings.
I know and work with quite a few queer clergy who are Christian, as well as those who are Jewish, Buddhist, and different varieties of Pagan. I think what marks most of us is that we have questioned the answers our early faiths gave us, and decided for ourselves what to accept and what to reject. I believe that most of us have decided that literal interpretations of any text are not working -- the key word here being "interpretations." There is no objectivity in matters of a spiritual nature. How a text is read depends not only on the translation one accesses, but on one's own nature and the social influences one draws upon to interpret the words on the page. Different versions of the Christian bible present different translations of the various books, and so to regard one version as the literal truth to be regarded as inerrant strikes me as impossible. If nothing else, translations are done by humans with biases, and those biases can affect which words appear on the page. This will inevitably change the meaning of the literal text between translations and versions, and bring up the question of exactly
which version is the "literal" truth.
As one feminist singer said:
My skin, my bones, my heretic heart
are my authority.
