First appeared June 22, 1997, in The Washington Post.
IN 1980, WORD BEGAN TO LEAK OUT that Congressman Jon Hinson (R) had been in a gay movie theater when it caught on fire and that he had later been arrested at the Iwo Jima Memorial, a well-known gay cruising spot in Washington. Once Hinson knew these incidents would be made public, he visited fundamentalist Protestant preachers in his Mississippi district and asked for their continued support. He got it, and was re-elected in a three-way contest, albeit narrowly.
Today, of course, no gay candidate could find political solace at the hands of the Christian Right, which has become the major opposition to the political and social revolution known as gay liberation.
But readers of Didi Herman's The Antigay Agenda, Orthodox Vision and the Christian Right (The University of Chicago Press) would not find Hinson's 1980 experience so surprising. Herman points out that conservative Protestant discussion of homosexuality in the 1960s and 1970s was relatively neutral. In 1970, for example, Christianity Today said of a gay Metropolitan Community Church in Los Angeles, "The great majority are indistinguishable in appearance from a typical WASP congregation... [who attend] in the hope that God, with a little help from his friends, will make his love known to them.î By the late 1980s, however, in response to social, political and even economic trends, the newly emergent political Christian Right had made opposition to gay and lesbian demands a centerpiece of its platform.
Herman's short 200-page book contains a wealth of information about conservative Protestantism and its battle against gay liberation. (She considers Roman Catholic views a separate topic). She discusses, for example, the Christian Right's portrayal of gay men not as stereotyped "effeminate, limp-wristed, ineffectual,î but as "masculinity out of control.î Gay male sex, in the words of Christian Right polemicists, is "raucous revelry, perverse promiscuity, orgiastic opulence, and apollyonic abandon.î Lesbians are attacked, less colorfully, as the logical extension of antifamily feminism.
Moreover, we learn of tensions within the Christian Right between the pietists, who value personal religious experience, and those -- now ascendant -- who want the church to influence the nation. We read of tensions between Christian conservatives who (secretly?) support a powerful theocratic state, and their secular economic allies, who prefer a smaller government with a live-and-let-live approach to morality.
The Antigay Agenda argues that the Christian Right's opposition to gay liberation is more than just a reaction to change. Rather, the antigay stance is part and parcel of fundamental Protestantism's core beliefs, including the infallibility of the Bible and a long-standing distaste for declining social -- and sexual -- standards, of which homosexual behavior is only one among many (abortion, divorce, pornography, promiscuity, etc.).
Ultimately, however, and even ironically, Herman exhibits the same flaws she sees -- correctly, in my view -- in the conservative Protestant operatives with whom she disagrees. She takes what Christian Right leaders consider a marginal doctrine known as postmillennialism -- that Christians must take over the world in preparation for the Second Coming of Christ -- and posits it as the prime motivation for conservative Christian political ambitions. This sounds very much like the Religious Right strategy of exhibiting examples of gay extremism -- e.g., the Lesbian Avengers wearing "We Recruitî T-shirts to a public school -- to demonstrate that homosexuals prey on children.
Moreover, such an analysis ignores other explanations for the Christian Right's foray into politics. For example, this is probably the first generation of Protestant fundamentalists in which a majority of its adherents are college educated and financially well off. As such, they want to get a place at the table once set exclusively for establishmentarian, mainline Protestants. This is similar to the kind of imprint on society and its politics, traditionally sought by ethnic, racial and other groups, including newly liberated gays and lesbians.
Herman's strategy for countering the conservative Christian antigay movement, which she makes near the end of the book, is "an invigorated, emancipatory, left-wing movement," though she offers no evidence that such a broad counter-attack would be attractive to a majority of Americans.
Despite its weaknesses, Herman's book presents considerable information not previously part of the nation's political discourse. And despite her British locale, the only miscue I noticed was her description of Phyllis Schlafly as "a longtime Christian activist." Schlafly is much better described as a political activist.
More importantly, while Herman makes clear her sympathy for gay
and lesbian political goals, she dissects the Christian Right's
antigay stance dispassionately, giving, as it were, the devil his
due. For anyone on either side of this passionate and important
conflict, that is an impressive accomplishment.