This passage always disturbed me deeply when I was a devout Christian, secretly gay boy in 1970s Alabama. We did not have a national system of Apartheid as in South Africa, but most Christian churches in the US South (and more than a few in the North) advocated for separation of the races in schools and churches. I witnessed much of the strife with my own eyes, as my pastor father’s board of deacons maneuvered to fire him for allowing Black people to attend our Baptist church. I experienced dissonance as I wondered how my father could simultaneously justify sending me to a private Christian school that would not enroll Black students.
It did not escape my attention that serious Christians sometimes used the passage you are writing about to advance a sort of “separate but equal" justification of structural racism.
They would claim it didn’t matter that Jesus recognized the inferiority of this woman and the need to remain apart from her, it mattered only that in the end he offered her “equal” treatment.
These racist ideas have mostly if not completely vanished from the American religious scene over the past few decades. In fact,even institutional memory has largely vanished, as people try to pretend their institutions never advanced “separate but equal” racist ideas in the name of Jesus.
But as an HIV/AIDS LGBTQ advocate beginning in my mid twenties, I watched it happen all over again. And it’s still happening.
Even as I spent my days working at a nonprofit agency that provided job training and placement to men and women living with HIV and AIDS, even as I spent my evenings marching in the streets with Act Up and Queer Nation, our fiercest enemies were always Christians.
And they used exactly the same sort of separate but equal arguments. It’s okay to revile the faggots, they were saying in effect (and sometimes explicitly). The Bible says they are sinners, and therefore we should treat them like shit.
The Catholic Church spent vast sums of political lobbying money attempting to stop safer sex education, for example, effectively ensuring that more of us would die, even as they pushed their horrific dogma that we are depraved and disordered. All along, Catholic leaders puffed themselves up, claiming to be about Christ-like love.
Protestant churches were usually no better, especially Evangelical ones. Starting in the 1970s but really gearing up in the 1980s, they led vicious media campaigns that morally stigmatized and dehumanized us.
Political lobbying efforts to interfere with HIV research and treatment, to say that safer sex education had to stop, always always always always always always were led by people who love Jesus.
The passage you are writing about is why they did it, although I’m not claiming they knew that’s why. They recognized and emulated the Jesus of this passage.
They believed it was perfectly fine to be like Jesus and revile somebody because they’re different.
This is just one of the reasons I struggle with such a visceral hatred of Christianity. I sincerely believe it’s an evil religion for the most part.
I hasten to add that I love many Christians and that I understand a very small minority of Christians are not evil bigots. But as a gay man living in the United States, I’m scared to death of most Christians. I’ll go even further than that. I detest most Christians, because of how they emulate the Jesus of this passage by morally condemning and hating me.
I don’t know how Christians are going to resolve this. I know how my progressive Christian friends have resolved it, but Christians who believe in biblical inerrancy and textual supremacy aren’t like my progressive Christian friends. I don’t think they can resolve it. I think they are just implacably evil people, and I don’t know what to do about that.
