Pre-Inaugural Memo to Rev. Rick Warren: Read Rev. William Sloane Coffin

The late Rev. William Sloane Coffin, jailed as a "Freedom Rider" during the Civil Rights Movement, issued an open letter to the Roman Catholic Bishops in 2000 on the role of gays and the Christian Church. Coffin passed on in the spring of 2006, but his open letter remains an inspiring and enduring testimony that deserves Rev. Rick Warren's attention on the eve of President-elect Barack Obama's administration for an inclusive society.

AN OPEN LETTER TO THE ROMAN CATHOLIC BISHOPS OF AMERICA Rev. William Sloane Coffin Washington, DC, November 14, 2000,

In a Washington cemetery, on the gravestone of a Vietnam veteran, it is written "When I was in the military, they gave me a medal for killing two men and a discharge for loving one."

Why, like the army, are so many churches on the wrong side of history? What is a man loving another immutably immoral? Can a Hamlet once again persuade a reluctant Horatio that "there are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy"?

As we have done in other cities addressing the leaders of other Christian denominations, so, dear Bishops, we have come today to Washington to plead with you to revisit your teaching on homosexuality. Previously you issued two shining pastorals, one supporting the poor, the other cautioning against war. But on this issue you are remounting the barricades, facing the wrong direction, causing much suffering and prompting countless seekers to say, "If this is religion we're better off without it."

Homosexuality was not a big issue for Biblical writers. Nowhere in the four Gospels it is even mentioned. And the verses that forbid homosexual behavior - all seven in seventy-one books - these should properly be used not to flay gays and lesbians but instead to chastise Christians who choose to recite a few sentences from St. Paul and to retain passages from a misread Old Testament law code. Everything Biblical is not Christ-like, and these particular verses, involving more hate than love, have no place whatsoever in the human heart. For Christians, the problem is not how to reconcile homosexuality with scriptural passages that condemn it, but how to reconcile the rejection and punishment of homosexuals with the love of Christ. If people can show the tenderness and constancy in caring that honors Christ's love, what matters their sexual orientation? Shouldn't a relationship be judged by its inner worth rather than by its outer appearance? Shouldn't a Christian sexual ethic focus on personal relationships and social justice rather than particular sexual acts, particularly when evidence increasingly emerges that homosexuality is a natural biological variation?

I'm a great believer in tradition. It's a big mistake casually to discount Church doctrines that once convinced the wisest among our Christian forebears. But doctrines are not immune to error; tradition is no oracle. And a tradition that cannot be changed also cannot be preserved. That lesson is as old as history itself. In other words, church people have always both to recover tradition and to recover from it.

I know that the Roman Catholic Church repudiates violent forms of homophobia. But to deplore the violence while continuing to proclaim the ideas that undergird it strikes thoughtful people as hypocritical. The teaching of the Church sanctifies the denigration of gays and lesbians. So instead of looking at gays and lesbians from the perspective of Catholic theology wouldn't it be better to look at Catholic theology from the perspective of gays and lesbians? The picture of Matthew Shepard hanging on a Wyoming fence burns in my mind and heart.

Said Edmund Burke: "Falsehood has a perennial spring." And why not? "Our knowledge is imperfect", "We see in a mirror dimly." Isn't that why the revelation of Jesus is finally about loving rather than knowing?

I close with another image, one that has haunted me for fifty years. Albert Camus complained of Christians who climb up on the cross to be seen from afar, thereby trampling on the One who has hung there so long.

Were you moved to respond I would be deeply grateful.

William Sloane Coffin

*Dr. Coffin presented this "Open Letter" to the National Conference of Catholic Bishops during a Soulforce, Dignity/USA, Equal Partner's in Faith Press Conference At a Vigil and Civil Disobedience at the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception Washington, DC, November 14, 2000, 10AM.

Comments

[mrclmind]

I, like so many of my gay friends, gave a lot of money to Obama's campaign. We worked tirelessly to get him elected. Now Obama decides to invite Rick Warren, who equates gays to rapists and child molesters; and who excludes gays from being members of his church to do the invocation? How many of Warren's followers do you think gave as much to the campaign as gays did? How many of Warren's followers worked as hard to get Obama elected as gays did? Warren is to gays what a Grand Wizard of the KKK is to African Americans. Obama has made it perfectly clear with this invitation how he feels about the gay community.

Do you think Obama would have had as much of a landslide if it wasn't for the gay community? I don't think so. I hope for his sake that all the evangelicals he is pandering to move over to his camp come reelection time; gays will be voting for a third party candidate from now on. It's been made perfectly clear that the Democrats don't want us. Good luck to Obama with his presidency. I don't support him any longer. I, like so many fell utterly betrayed.

[mommadona]

I doubt if a fundamentalist who believes in the virtual word of the bible would ever 'lower' himself to read a Catholic point of view.

Nice try.

Intolerance is as intolerance does.

When you purposely built your castle on that "shifting sand", it's impossible to see another view.

[Jude2004]

The fundamentalist church I was raised in never spoke against homosexuality in my childhood/youth. They do now. Back then, they complained that we lacked persecution and therefore people weren't strong in their faith; they found enemies in modernism (e.g., any social trend or scientific advance that took place after about 1400 A.D.). They're strengthened in their resolve to not change no matter what changes take place in society.

[kempis]

Thank you for posting this.

Bless Rev. Sloane Coffin. What a brave and compassionate soul he was. We need more like him.