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By Bob Minor
Minor Details
This time of year it's hard to ignore the religion that comes at us.
Year-end religion is so necessary for a profitable U.S. retail business that it spills off the shelves onto the floors, into the streets, and all over public spaces. In addition, this year we're guaranteed that symbols of "peace on earth" will be used to promote "the war." For those of us who continue to suffer from the spiritual abuse that our culture normally serves up, coping with this deluge of sensory stimuli can further sour us on the whole thing. "Bah, Humbug," is a more common response than our society cares to admit. There's probably no one who has grown up in our culture who hasn't experienced spiritual abuse. There are cable channels and programs that seem sincerely devoted to it. "Hi," the door-to-door visitors say in a religious comic strip. "We're from the church down the street and we'd like to quote the Bible to you and make you feel like dirt." And they call that "Good News."
The popularity of the Christian fundamentalist Left Behind series of novels shows how abused we have been. And arguments that there are other, less abusive ways to interpret religious texts don't seem to cut it for many. It's as if abuse becomes us because we are so used to it. We wouldn't know what to do otherwise. We're like the abused children and partners who return to our abusers for more because we can't live without it emotionally. For those of us who need religion in our lives, sorting out the toxic from the healthy messages is our main task and it's often not easy. That's why counselor/minister Terry Norman's book, Just Tell the Truth (1998), is an insightful example of reframing the messages gay men (and others) hear when they struggle with their religious beliefs in order to attain what he calls "orientational authenticity." For LGBT people who have found their value in religious communities, it is common to believe that the struggle between fully admitting and embracing their sexual orientation and confronting their "straight-affirming" beliefs is the Divine calling them to guilt and shame. Dr. Norman sees the truth otherwise. And we can choose to see it differently as well. The Divine, he suggests, is actually struggling with us against those old negative, anti-gay beliefs. The struggle is actually Its unrelenting call to us to embrace our sexual orientation, to come out. The struggle is due to our lack of authenticity, to our clinging to the anti-LGBT beliefs and feelings which we have so long embraced and which toxic religion wants us to promote. The Good, he asks us to consider, is really on the side of our coming out, our telling the truth. And until we do that, we will struggle, believing it is the Divine that is holding us back while the Divine is actually calling us to authenticity. How we see things and frame our life is really our own choice. And affirming those old anti-LGBT beliefs has likewise really been little more than the choice of others through the ages. It's really our choice as to what we consider inspired, whether it is traditional or modern. The historical fact is that every major religion has had times when it has oppressed LGBT people and times when it has not. Every major religion has had periods when it has affirmed individual and personal revelations as well as periods when it has been fearfully, hierarchically authoritative, denying that individual spirituality is insightful and valuable. Past, unhealed spiritual abuse may keep us acting defensively and in anger in our inability to escape religion in the public and secular spheres this time of year. That reflects those personal issues that we have not fully dealt with regarding religion and the spiritual abuse of our pasts. It reflects our own past dashed expectations from family and faith. Yet we can also choose to reframe this time of year, to create our own spaces and relax right in the middle of this commercial and religious blast. We can use it as a time to explore and appreciate our comfort with having no religion, or examine if religion matters to us and how.
When it comes to this season, we can choose what speaks to us and reject
what does not.
I am uninspired by whether the oil lamps in the Jewish Temple really remained lit or not. But Hanukkah inspires me with the message of human beings who seek their own liberation by taking charge of their destiny, and, against the greatest odds, standing up against the oppressions of their society. Likewise, the Christmas stories often sound hokey, but I'm impressed with the ones that say the outcasts of society (like the shepherds) and the "pagan astrologers" (the Magi from the East) were the ones who got the message, while the Bible-quoting, religious rightists who preached the dominant religious understanding of the time remained clueless and hostile. 
Robert N. Minor is author of Scared Straight: Why It's So Hard
to Accept Gay People and Why It's So Hard to Be Human and is Professor
of Religious Studies at the University of Kansas. He may be reached at
www.fairnessproject.org.
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