The Southern Baptist Church Has Always Been Safe Harbor for ... Flamboyance

 

Southern Baptists are hilarious. The largest Protestant denomination in the nation, wagged by the tail of 10,500 "messengers" (out of way-over 12 million total members), voted overwhelmingly at this year's annual convention in Dallas (happening this week) to approve a resolution calling for the reversal of Obergefell, the Supreme Court's decision 10 years ago legalizing gay marriage.

Andrew Walker, an "ethicist" (what?) at a Southern Baptist seminary in Kentucky, wrote the resolution and admitted that he and his anti-gay allies in the church are playing the "long game," like Maoists of old, never giving up their longshot at reversing the Law of the Land -- a public policy of sweeping and basic humanity, the legal right for gay couples to form family units, which is actually supported by a huge majority of Americans in poll after poll. The long game of people like Andrew Walker is based, after all, on what worked just fine in eventually getting rid of abortion rights. Their fanatical patience to outwit, outplay, and outlast majority opinion seems blessed right now by the general run of authoritarianism taking over the nation, not to mention the current membership on the Supreme Court (Messrs. Alito, Thomas, Gorsuch and no telling who else). Political evangelicals -- those whose piety is most influenced (or dented, actually) by the colossal sinners they need to keep in power -- they know whose feet to kiss, who deserves a laying-on-of-hands. 

Anyhoo, I'm about to draw on decades of fairly intense immersion in the Southern Baptist ethos of West Texas -- as I contemplate how those Baptist messengers in Dallas must rationalize the implicit insult their vote against gay marriage must be to the closeted gays and, yes, queers, including frequently the church organist and music director, that sit in pews in every last one of those strict churches (I'm betting). Some LGBTQ Baptists, raised from infancy in Sunday School and Vacation Bible School and Sunday night preachings and spring revivals and special youth activities, never left home, physically or psychologically, and never gave up their innocent and true faith that they have been saved and born again by the grace of Jesus Christ. They can't quit the church that nurtured them, the family and neighbors they enjoy dinner-on-the-ground with, and besides, they don't cause any trouble, stay to themselves, and anyway, everyone knows already, like everyone also knows you don't mention it, you don't speak of it, you pretend it isn't even there. Good Lord! Gay people -- many who admittedly didn't know (yet?) that they were gay -- they were everywhere in the Southern Baptist world I grew up in.

Not that I was a Baptist at first. I was the sole Pentecostal -- speaking in tongues, the works! -- in school with mainly Baptists, and a smattering of what everybody called Campbellites, and one or two Methodists. (Loved the Methodists because they weren't afraid to have fun. People said they held young-people dances in the church basement.)

I was actually good friends with at least two queer Baptists in high school, though in those days I didn't have a clue what that meant and probably neither did they. I did know that queer was something you didn't want to be called, without understanding at all the physical implications in that word. Queer kids from good families were common, not numerous but certainly there, and I later understood that they knew how to pass, to fit in, to be a part of the social fabric of that society -- accepted for their quirks, especially their unusual talents and high IQs. Whatever went on in private in the dark was beyond my ken, not to mention my elementary understanding. I was not just a nerd. I was an oblivious nerd. My obliviousness actually got joke-awarded as a senior when I received the Out to Lunch Award at a graduation luncheon (where else but at the local Baptist Church). My classmates were trying to tell me something, which I still didn’t get. I took the trophy and turned to my (closeted gay) friend, “What does this mean?”

I began to get more of a rough education in definitions when I attended Wayland Baptist College on a scholarship, the only Pentecostal on campus. Ironically, despite the macho reputation of a Texas-upbringing, the place was pretty well supplied with soft boys and what I heard for the first time called "squishes," actually really nice guys who were kind and generous and often very funny, who were majoring in music and psychology and English, pursuing the trajectory of their religion into church music and counseling and teaching -- hell, some of those nice boys actually thought they wanted to be preachers and were heavy into religion classes -- hiding or playing games with their identities and (I guess) suffering in the hollow silence. Some dated girls. Some even married girls and enjoyed by all appearances long, successful marriages. They never unraveled an inch of their carefully ironed fabric of denial and conformity.

Here’s a confession: I wasn't baptized into the denomination, at a fairly big church in Plainview-By-God, Texas, where I was a Junior in college, until I decided to social-climb. I had been dating a brainiac Southern Baptist woman, and we were going to get married. Her whole family was Southern Baptist. I thought I needed to be too. I had grown tired of being the only holy-roller, and had begun to think for myself. Some of my humanist teachers were making me less doctrinaire. I had become a skeptic who asked a lot of questions.

Considerably later came the scandals that ripped at our pious smugness -- the literal outings of Bible-thumping evangelical shouters who were discovered to be covering up a secret life, or revealed to be imposing themselves on young acolytes, or proving to be blabber-mouth drunks. I seem to remember one of those coming out of Jerry Falwell University recently. Hell, Jerry Falwell hisownself had a gay speechwriter named Mel White who also ghost-wrote Falwell’s autobiography as well as the official autobiographies of Pat Robertson and Billy Graham.

So this is the message the Southern Baptist majority have sent: Gays are just fine in church and serving as amanuenses and organists and music directors, even counselors and youth directors, as long as they live the lie, stay invisible and undemonstrative about any secret proclivities, not to mention any legal rights they might wildly and mistakenly think they need.

That’s why the Southern Baptists are unintentionally hilarious.