CANDACE CHELLEW-HODGE grew up playing with Tonka trucks in the aisles of the Southern Baptist church where her father was the pastor. When her parents divorced and, later, when she came to understand that she was a lesbian, she found less and less reason to pay much attention to the church.
Then, in her twenties, a girlfriend talked her into attending a service at a Metropolitan Community Church (MCC), the first denomination founded with the intention of having an affirming ministry for the gay and lesbian community. “The first day at this MCC in Atlanta was transforming,” she says. “I sat there and cried because it felt like I’d come home.”
In 1996, her involvement in the Christian community—and a desire for Christian reading material that didn’t disparage glbt people—led her to found Whosoever (whosoever.org), “an online magazine for gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender Christians.” Through the webzine, Chellew-Hodge gained enough recognition to be invited to gay Christian conferences, where she began conducting “spiritual self-defense” workshops. These workshops led to her first book, Bulletproof Faith. Along the way, she has also overseen a Yahoo Groups listserve for readers of Whosoever, attended seminary, and currently serves as pastor for Jubilee! Circle, a start-up congregation of the United Church of Christ in Columbia, South Carolina. She regularly blogs at Religion Dispatches.
Since that first visit to the MCC over twenty years ago, Chellew-Hodge has become a consistent and vocal advocate for glbt rights within the Christian community, speaking against religious bigotry in its own language.
Neil Ellis Orts: With all your travels since you started Whosoever, is it safe to assume you’ve run into a wide range of gay and lesbian Christians?
Candace Chellew-Hodge: I think as in any community of humans they run a gamut from ultra-liberal to ultra-conservative. I don’t understand the ultra-conservative, but they’re there.
NEO: So this is probably not a question that can easily be answered in a general sense, but what are you seeing out there as major issues for gay and lesbian Christians?
CCH: It’s interesting to me how it really parallels the straight community, theologically speaking. What I see growing in the gay and lesbian community is the more evangelical sort of worship styles and theologies. The more evangelical strain, even among gay and lesbian Christians, seems to be where people are drawn. But I wonder if the evangelical strains that are growing are more of an entry point. I wonder, especially for those [GLBT] people for whom religion is important, if they are people who are from the more evangelical churches and they come out and realize who they are, but they are more comfortable in an evangelical setting. They go to these evangelical outfits that are there for them—and thank God they’re there for them—and they work out their spirituality and their sexuality.
But I would like to know, do they move on? Do they grow spiritually and move to a place where that evangelical mindset isn’t quite as comfortable anymore? When they start to think theologically more deeply, does the cognitive dissonance hit them? Do they grow into a faith that is, if not more mature, at least more comfortable with questions and uncertainties, and not always having to have pat answers? Brian McLaren talks in his latest book about stages of faith, and he really made me more sensitive to praising “mature faith” over “immature faith.” It’s not so much that, but it’s more a question of what stage you are in now. What stage is making the most sense right now? Be in that stage and embrace that stage, but don’t be snotty about it and say this is the stage everyone should be in.
NEO: When I check in with the on-line magazine Whosoever, I still see people coming with questions about salvation and biblical interpretation. Is it fair to say that these are still the big pastoral care issues for gay and lesbian Christians?
CCH: The ones who will ask you the questions, the ones who really want your input into their spiritual lives, are the ones who are in that stage of trying to reconcile with the Bible. “People are still telling me I’m going to hell, and I’m not sure who’s right. The old voices keep telling me this and the new voices keep telling me that, and I don’t know how to make up my mind.” Try as you might, it’s hard to reassure people when they’re in that quandary. You can talk to them—and I’ve talked to plenty of them along the way and tried to reassure them: “No, you’re not going to hell.” The hardest message to get across to people, and I say it so often that people must think I’m a broken record, is this: God loves you. There really is nothing you can do to make God stop loving you. It even says this in the Bible. Paul says it in Romans. Neither height nor depth—nothing separates you from the love of God. I keep telling people, if there is a judgment day, this is what I imagine will happen. You will sit before the throne of God, and God will say, “You got all of this absolutely right. For that, you are blessed. This stuff over here? You got that absolutely, totally, wrong. I can’t believe how wrong you got it! And for that, you are forgiven.” If the religious Right is right about God, I will happily be wrong. Because if God is the ogre they say God is, I have no interest in it. If that is who God turns out to be, then thank God I didn’t believe in him! Because that God would be awful to spend eternity with!
NEO: You’ve said that the most visited page of Whosoever is the page that takes on the “clobber passages” of the Bible. Is that still true?
CCH: Yes, it continues to be the page with the most visitors. Like I said, everyone is at different stages, and one of the first things people want to know is that they’re okay with the Bible.
NEO: What do you see as having changed in the gay and lesbian Christian community since you’ve been active in it?
CCH: If you had told me twenty years ago that the Lutherans would be ordaining gay pastors, and that the Presbyterians would be on the verge of it, and the United Church of Christ would be affirming same sex marriages, and gay and lesbian people would be able to go to this many mainstream churches, and there would be a gay Episcopal bishop, I would have called you crazy, a dreamer! So, over twenty years, the visibility of gay and lesbian Christians have been raised a lot. Twenty years ago, if you said “gay Christians,” people would laugh at you. MCC churches would be painted as Sunday morning cruise spots, just a bar without the beer. But MCC is a real church, and the denomination has grown over twenty years, and you’ve seen other denominations becoming more open and accepting. The profile of gay and lesbian Christians has grown immensely in the past twenty years.
That doesn’t mean that new people aren’t still grappling with the same issues about what the Bible says or doesn’t say. But now you have far more resources for delving into that. You have lots of writers like Daniel Helminiak, Robin Scroggs, Bishop [John Shelby] Spong, and Peter Gomes who have come out with excellent books that help you along that path and make that reconciliation easier. So I think the last twenty years have been amazing for gay and lesbian Christians. Of course, Lutherans Concerned have been around for a long time, the UCC Coalition for Gay and Lesbian Concerns have been around for a long time, More Light Presbyterians have been out there forever, as has the Cornet for the United Methodists. Certainly we wish for more and we hope for more. We hope the Presbyterians will catch up and the Methodists will stop receding, but I think gay and lesbian Christians have far more resources, and that can only be a good thing.
NEO: What does Christianity have to offer the gay community?
CCH: It’s not so much specific to the gay community, but to the human community. What I think religion, spirituality, Christianity offers any of us is just a chance at deeper connection—not even a deeper connection to God, which of course is the ultimate goal, but a deeper connection to each other, and deeper ways to find and live and be in a community. I spent a lot of years outside the church and a lot of years avoiding relationships, avoiding being in community because community is messy. Community is never pretty. There’s always somebody coming in and mucking things up. There’s always drama. Where people are, drama follows! But we are better as a world and a society when we come together and figure out how to live in the mess together and how to clean up the mess up and how to connect on these levels that we can’t connect otherwise. Part of the problem I see in the gay and lesbian community is that we seek community in all the wrong ways, simply because we are denied the opportunity to have community in healthy ways. Religious communities give people an opportunity to connect in healthy ways. The holy reaches us through other people, through these rituals that we do, when we come together with the intention of being together as a community. That’s what church should offer anyone, gay, straight or otherwise. I think it offers gay and lesbian people a way to have community in ways that we’ve been denied.
And I try to tell my new community, we’re not here for certainty, we’re here for the mystery. If you want certainty, don’t come to this church because I’m not going to give it to you. I’m only going to give you more questions to ask. Any time you get involved with the holy, it gets messy.
NEO: My Old Testament professor in seminary told us that another legitimate translation for the Hebrew word that we translate as “holy” is “weird.”
CCH: Yes, and God is definitely weird! I think there is too much certainty in the world. Everyone is too certain about shit. We need more uncertainty, we need more mystery.
NEO: So going forward, how can the gay and lesbian Christian community shape the conversation rather than always reacting to it?
CCH: I think the gay and lesbian Christian community has done an excellent job of shaping the conversation. How else could we have made the strides we have made in the [various]denominations? We’ve been showing our lives, we’ve been talking about our lives, we’ve been living our lives in the midst of all these places that say we don’t exist. I think if we want to keep shaping the conversation, we’ve just got to keep talking.
