Recruiting young love: how Christians talk about homosexuality

Abstract

(ProQuest: ... denotes non-US-ASCII text omitted.)Caught up in stakes of debate, neither American Christians nor scholars of American religions often pause to ask how this largely Christian dispute emerged in its current terms or why it seems to center on sexual identify formation of teenaged boys. In this fascinating volume, Mark Jordan steps beyond bounds of Roman Catholic tradition to explore these questions with his trademark blend of history, cultural studies, theology, ethics, and rhetorical criticism, which here takes center stage. Also characteristically, Jordan points from conversations that were to those that could be.Jordan argues that Christian talk about has been composed of a series of erratic fast rhetorics built on a foundation of enduring slow rhetorics (211-12). Both have focused primarily on white males in their vulnerable adolescence. Jordan's starting points are psychologists G. Stanley Hall, whose Adolescence (New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1904) arguably invented term, and Havelock Ellis, to whose work on sexuality Hall alluded elliptically, as well as novelist Forman Brown, in whose semi-autobiographical Better Angel (New York: Greenberg, 1933) psycho-spiritual rhetoric of homosexuality that would typify next seventy years of American conversation was activated by 1933 (25).On this stage Jordan artfully erects a series of roughly chronological tableaux (xix) that illustrate repetition, development, and metamorphosis of this basic rhetoric. The first is composed of Kinsey reports, which normalized same-sex sexual interaction, and pulp novels like Gore Vidal's The City and Pillar (New York: Dutton, 1948), which provided a glimpse into gay life, wrapped in imagery of Sodom and Gomorrah. Both performed earlier rhetoric in a new key for a wider public, forcing religious leaders who disliked their permissiveness to employ their language, setting a precedent for combining scientific idiom of psychology with those of sin, virtue, and tragedy.In next scene, American Christian moralists and churches divide discourse: action from person, moral judgment from legal recommendation, and individual tendency from social cause, creating a space for the homosexual to find an outlet for his desire and to live uncondemned, if tragically. Jordan also traces mid-century rise of homophile groups where gay men--read as members of an oppressed race--could pursue what they were already calling their spirituality at a safe distance from Egypt. In this tableau sexual orientation becomes a matter of birth, and therefore something with which God must reckon.Jordan also notes early Quaker and Episcopalian efforts to describe as non-pathological. Ironically, public homophobia abetted this development: urban Christian youth ministry programs pursued queer youth at behest of homophile organizations which--out of public fear of recruitment and sexual exploitation of adolescents--were explicitly forbidden to work with them.Next on docket are post-Christian utopian spiritual visions and gay ire at Christian homophobia, a dialectical pairing that makes room for celebrations of created goodness of in self-consciously Christian gay movements. Jordan notes unintended consequences: gay liberationists replaced idea of adolescence with idea of coming out in young adulthood, leaving behind chronological adolescents. …