The power of story to challenge prejudice

Warren Hartley, co-founder of the first Open Table community in Liverpool. PHOTO: Mark Loudon.

THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND’s Living in Love and Faith process on identity, sexuality, relationships and marriage has stirred up a lot for many LGBTQIA+ people in the last few years.

Warren Hartley, LGBTQIA+ Ministry Facilitator at St Bride’s Liverpool where the first Open Table community began, reflects on his experience of the process, and a phrase in the debate which reveals a real problem:

The debate on identity, sexuality, relationships and marriage in the Church of England has been long, and toxic at times. I’ve heard again and again a phrase about which I have become increasingly uncomfortable and concerned: ‘the privileging of story’.

“Hiding the history and keeping the invisibility of LGBTQIA+ people within our culture is just one way of continuing the lie that we are somehow perverted, and not fit to take up a place of equality within our communities. ”

I first heard that phrase during the Shared Conversations, a facilitated listening process on ‘Scripture, Mission and Human Sexuality’ between 2014 and 2016, in which I took part. I wrote about that experience here. It has arisen again more than once during the ongoing conversations.

The phrase is usually used within conversations between people who are affirming of LGBTQIA+ people, and those who are not. Firstly, it is used by those who prefer to ‘break open scripture’ together, rather than discuss our individual stories and opinions, and secondly, to move away from the cultural phenomenon disparagingly termed ‘sob stories’.

Both of these might be valid desires, but this is where I begin to feel uncomfortable. If we move away from telling stories of the individuals affected by the theologies and teachings of our church (on which we do not have a common mind), we don’t have to face the damage those theologies and teachings are doing and thus undertake the far more difficult work of self-reflection and internal change that is needed.

In these conversations I feel like I’m being asked to be silent. I don’t believe this request is intentional, yet how do I understand this feeling of being asked to be silent while continuing to faithfully and peacefully dissent from my religious tradition? How do I speak the truth of my experience, life and love, as well as those of others I support, into the ongoing conversations? As Steve Chalke, a Baptist minister who activelty advocates for LGBTQIA+ people, has said:

It should never be the responsibility of those who are excluded to make a case for their own inclusion: but it normally is.

- Steve Chalke, Twitter, Jan 19, 2020

1. The desire to ‘break open scripture together’.

I confess that I don’t really understanding this turn of phrase. I spent the first 21 years of my life within the evangelical sub-culture of the Christian world. I was taught, and believed, it was the only world that was true, that all other interpretations of the Christian tradition were wrong and their followers destined to hell. I’ve now spent 27 years out of that tradition and have a very different understanding of scripture today.

Thus when I hear the term ‘break open scripture’, I approach it with a set of interpretative principles, my personal and cultural history, authors I have read, ideas from the community I’m a part of, even a classically Anglican perspective of looking at theology from a viewpoint of reason, tradition AND scripture. Not the ‘sola scriptura’ approach of my youth.

The irony in the desire to move away from ‘the privileging of story’ to look at scripture is that our scriptures are nothing but stories! These stories were written down over 1300 years or more. Some are factually true, many not. Some describe historical events through the interpretive lens of the culture and language of the Hebrew people. The scriptures are an unfolding story of a community’s experience of the divine, attempting to interpret it in human experience. They did this through telling their stories! They shared their experience and collective insight into what it meant to be a nation, a tribe, a person, a man, a woman, a eunuch etc. As the wisdom unfolded and more insight was gained, the stories adapted. For example, in the book of Deuteromy [Deut. 7:1-4] God dictates that the Israelites should utterly destroy every living Canaanite and possess their land. Today we could call that genocide, yet here is a story from the scriptures showing God specifically ordering the wiping out of an entire tribe of men, women, children, and their animals. The Bible even states that the Israelites achieved this aim, yet the Canaanites appear again throughout the scriptures. Indeed DNA testing has shown that modern Lebanese people share around 90% of their DNA with ancient Canaanites.

The Bible isn’t ‘true’ but does contain truth. It contains stories of situations that we face as humans today. The individual elements of the situations may be different (e.g. the ancient Israelites didn’t have nuclear bombs like the British do) but the political intrigue and perpetual attempt of humans to justify their own tribal loyalties and political expediencies are much the same as today. The Bible contains stories of the mess that humanity makes, and the prophets provide a constant call back to the basic premise upon which our spiritual tradition rests: that all humans, every last one, is made in the image of the divine which called the universe into being, and that every human being has intrinsic value and worth. The prophets call us to ‘do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God’ [Micah 6:8].

A Canaanite woman, a member of a race that was meant to have been wiped out by their ancestors, appears in Matthew’s gospel [Matthew 15:21-28] asking Jesus to heal her daughter. Like other members of his nation, Jesus effectively called her a dog. Yet that isn’t the end of the story. Jesus changes his mind and moves to treating her like a fellow human being. The uncomfortable truth, the transgressor of boundaries and living reminder of the past sins of his people, is part of the reconciliation, welcomed into the story.

Scripture is important. It tells stories from the ancient past of humans wrestling with what it means to be human and the working out of that profound spiritual insight that humans are made in the image of God. This ancient wisdom is vital to understanding our past, but isn’t the final word. It can never be a manual containing all knowledge. Knowing the past and our stories points us to why the stories were told. Why the stories were told is far more important that what the stories say. If, by ‘breaking open scripture’, we can begin to understand why the story is being told and the truth held within the story, we may begin to get somewhere.

2. The desire to move away from ‘sob stories’

This seems to be a reaction to the individualistic culture of Western society, where we have dumped many of the stories our ancestors told about who and what we are to seek new ways of explaining which reflect our cultural experiences. This may be a valid criticism, but why has that movement grown up within our culture? These movements don’t simply spontaneously appear - what is it reacting against from our past?

I find the phrase ‘privileging of story’ intriguing. It suggests that the stories it refers to aren’t part of the story told by the privileged, and are thus suspect or not as important. Is it more a case of privileging the privileged stories? I don’t think this is unique to LGBTQIA+ people. It is true of the poor, of marginalised ethnic groups, of women, and many more. As humans we seem to like to know that our tribe, our group is right and that the other tribes or groups are all wrong, with nothing in the middle. We end up defending our tribe when all evidence speaks to the opposite because we can’t be part of the ‘other’ and thus be excluded or, even worse, have to change our own minds and ways of living because of the encounter with the ‘other’.

A kinder interpretation might be that opposition to ‘privileging the story’ is a valid desire not to move from individual experience to universal prescription. Just as the scriptural stories and our tribal stories cannot be spoken outside of the constraints of our culture and language, the story of an individual cannot be taken out of the individual’s own context, history and experience. All stories are subjective, but can be given context when told in a community. Communities, if open to it, can give the individual a context, an interpretative framework within which to interpret their own experience and to tell their story. Each individual story isn’t meant to be the end, but a contribution to the collective wisdom of a community, grounding it, supporting it and ideally liberating the individual and others to grow, dream and hope.

Interpreting our stories

Stories and myths are a universal part of the human experience. Myth, though, has become a dirty word in modern times, a way of saying something is ‘untrue’, or from a less enlightened time. We still tell stories to children,and ourselves, to help make sense of our experiences. I’ve been changed by stories I’ve heard - the experiences of others, scriptural stories, history, and other myths, and I believe this is the only way we can change. The gospels record Jesus as being ‘moved by love’ or ‘moved by compassion’ in his encounters with people. This should be our response when someone shares their story. Our aim should not be to interpret their story for them by providing a prescriptive meta-narrative or over-arching story to which they must conform, but to empower them to make sense of their experience and find their own place within the greater story.

One of the most transformative books I ever read was Out of the Past by Neil Miller. It traces the stories of LGBT+ people in British history over 150 years. It was transformative because it told me I wasn’t alone! This wasn’t some modern ‘disease’ - I stood within a long line of people who had been courageous, walked against the tide of the culture, and found their place (or not), within it. This was emboldening. The first step of an invading culture is to take away the story and language of the indigenous people. Hiding the history and keeping the invisibility of LGBTQIA+ people within our culture is just one way of continuing the lie that we are somehow perverted, and not fit to take up a place of equality within our communities.

In 2017, to mark 50 years since the partial decriminalisation of male homosexuality in England and Wales, the National Trust held a number of exhibitions on this theme, to much criticism. This was particularly true of an exhibition at Kingston Lacy in Dorset , a house owned by a gay man who lived in exile in France rather than risk the death penalty in his native England. The exhibition told the story of William John Bankes, an explorer, scholar and art director in 1834. One of the installations is of 51 ropes with nooses, in memory of 51 men who were hanged under laws that criminalised same-sex acts during Bankes’ lifetime. The facts of the story weren’t disputed, but daring to tell the story was criticised as political or ‘inappropriate’. Stories have power.

As I grew up, I was told was that gay people were an abomination to God. Gay men seemed to come into particular opprobrium. I sat through many sermons calling for the death penalty apparently prescribed in the book of Exodus [Leviticus 20:13]. Gay men and gay sex were ‘disgusting’ and the faith tradition and prevailing culture were united in one voice of condemnation. The very few I dared to broach the subject with told me stories of gay men growing old and lonely, getting HIV and dying of AIDS, and that it was simply impossible for two men to love each other and be faithful.

I believed these stories. What reason did I have not to at the time? However, as I dared to stop listening, to begin to explore my story and experience and those of others who’d actually walked a different path, I discovered stories of love and faithfulness, of relationships spanning decades and lifetimes. Stories of exclusion and loneliness, rejection by family and faith communities. Stories of triumph, and just every day stories of making one’s way through life. I discovered my own story, of love and faithfulness with my husband, which we continue to write, step by step. I discovered a ministry amongst the LGBT community and, as we grew in knowledge and more stories joined ours, we added the letters QIA+ to expand the story. I discovered a broader Christian tradition, and minority voices spanning millennia.

The stories I was told as a young person about ‘them’ turned out to be untrue. The stories were stereotypes and prejudices told as an attempt to care for me. I genuinely believe the majority of people who told these stories wanted the best for the people in their care, and repeated the stories they were told to attempt to give me tools with which to navigate through life. Sadly, the stories did the opposite, and drove me to mental ill health and despair, until I found liberation in other stories and began to dare to tell my own.

Like many things in human experience, the arguments about whether LGBTQIA+ people have a valid and equal place within our spiritual and cultural communities is a power struggle. Who controls the meta-narrative? Each side has one and fights it out, often by attempting to shout the loudest. LGBTQIA+ people will take their place as equals in our communities because it is the right thing to do, not because someone shouted the loudest. Why is the right thing to do? Well let me tell you a story.

Around 2000 years ago a Jewish man was travelling around the Levant stirring up quite a sensation. He was breaking taboos, speaking to outsiders, touching the untouchable, and breaking the law. He was a real pain in the backside of the religious authorities, and was giving people ideas above their station. He even dared to say that the entire religious tradition of his people could be summed up in two phrases: ‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength and with all your mind, and love your neighbour as yourself’ [Mark 12:30-31] .

This challenged the power of the privileged. This upstart story teller from the provinces dared to empower the powerless. We as people of faith and tellers of ‘the greatest story ever told’ have a power to bring about change and great liberation for our world. As Martin Luther King Jr said:

‘power without love is reckless and abusive, and love without power is sentimental and anaemic. Power at its best is love implementing the demands of justice, and justice at its best is power correcting everything that stands against love’.

- Martin Luther King Jr, Southern Christian Leadership Conference, 16th August 1967.

So does story trump everything?

Should my experience, and my interpretation of it, be gospel to all and sundry with whom I deign to share it? Stories are subjective by their very nature - it is practically impossible to escape the confines of our language and culture when interpreting story and history. We can’t know all there is to know, nor can we sit in a constant state of not knowing, so we have to rely on our interpretation of the facts at the time, and hopefully remain open to those interpretations changing in response to the environment around us. At best, our individual and corporate stories are axioms, accepted truths that help us make sense of experience which can be changed with growing knowledge.

Music provides a helpful metaphor. Consider the human race as an orchestra. The orchestra is comprised of a multitude of instruments, with banks of similar instruments, some smaller groupings, and some individual instruments with small parts yet all playing a symphony. Everyone has their part to play - even discordant notes can be made part of the melody, the haunting beauty of the minor key, the boldness of the major key, and the loudness of the brass and drums. Take one out and it will still be an orchestra and a symphony, but lacking something. LGBTQIA+ folk are a part of the song of our world, and our faith communities, and by silencing that storyline in the music the rest of humanity is poorer for it. By telling our stories, my dream is that we can call our LGBTQIA+ siblings into this symphony so they find the place where they can sing and play and shine, and this doesn’t stop any other instrument in the orchestra from doing the same!

Queering the story

I am not willing to put my chains back on [Galatians 5:1]. I spent too long being told that I didn’t fit, I didn’t belong, I didn’t think right, feel right, look right for whichever group was in the majority and defining whose stories were privileged, e.g. school peers or religious teachers. I had to conform to their narrative of right and wrong, good and bad, or I was messing up the system. This ironically reveals the reality of queer theory and queer theology which challenges false binaries and the cultural assumptions on which they are based. As a queer person, I transgress the polarised ‘clear’ categories established within cultures and religious communities, ‘mess up’ their neat systems, and are thus ‘punished’ for that transgression with exclusion and suspicion.

So I will continue to tell my story, and the stories shared with me, including stories of horror, death, violence, triumph and most importantly of all, love. Not because they are more important, contain more truth, or are more tragic, than anyone else’s, but because:

‘We cannot live in a world that is interpreted for us by others. An interpreted world is not a hope. Part of the terror is to take back our own listening. To use our own voice. To see our own light.’

- ‘Hildegard of Bingen, Warrior of Light’, Elaine Bellezza, Gnosis magazine, vol 21, 1991