Subtitle: Gay Men and Women Come to Terms with Religion
Author: David Shallenberger
Subject: General Interest/Religion/Gay and Lesbian Studies
Cloth ISBN 0-8135-2488-1
Pages: 304 pp., 6 b&w photos
Description: Twelve gay men and women talk about faith and spirituality in light of a religious climate often hostile to homosexuality.
In a world in which religion and homosexuality are often by definition incompatible, it is crucial to hear from gay men and women about how they perceive themselves to be religious or spiritual people. Eliciting powerful, frank, and sometimes troubling responses, David Shallenberger interviewed gay men and women who grew up in families that belonged to traditional religions-Jewish, Roman Catholic, and Protestant-that rejected homosexuality as an unacceptable life-style. When these children grew into adulthood and "came out," many rejected the religion of their childhood as they sought out a more accepting gay community. But once they became comfortable with their new gay identity, they began to experience a spiritual hunger and a desire to be part of a religious community. Some sought to return to the traditions from which they came; others desired membership in new religious communities.
The quest for an integration of homosexuality and spirituality is the focus of Reclaiming the Spirit. Shallenberger asks how individuals can balance both a gay and a religious identity, whether coming out is a spiritual experience, and how coming out affects an individual's relationship to a traditional religious community. Divided into chapters that correspond to the common stages of spiritual integration, Reclaiming the Spirit is immensely readable and introduces an important group of voices into the hotly contested debates surrounding religion and gay participation.
DAVID SHALLENBERGER is an associate professor at the School for New Learning, DePaul University. He has published widely on homosexuality and religion in journals like Qualitative Sociology and Religious Humanism.
Voices from Reclaiming the Spirit
RACHEL: It's been a big struggle for me, to reconcile the fact that I live religiously, without a belief in God. . . I was raised in Judaism, and I don't believe in Judaism. . . yet culturally, I like to experience Jewish things. I think that if I can reinterpret Judaism and the rituals of Judaism for my own needs, then that will be very important to me.
GERALD: Being gay made me take a big detour for a while. But, I think because I'm gay, maybe I feel more integrated. I've had to reintegrate my spirituality and my sexuality, and that's been a major struggle. But I think because of that, I'm more whole now. . . . I have a much deeper understanding of God's love and grace, because I know just how far from Him I got, when I turned away or ignored Him. And I know how much He called me back, I know how He kept calling me, like he was leading me out on my leash, and then He started reeling me back in over a length of time. I know He did that for love, and I have a much more, I think, profound understanding of that. I never really understood grace until I was able to look at it on this side of being gay, instead of on the other side.
MARY: The difficulty has been trying to resolve whether or not there was any meaningful way I could be in relationship with the church. I've had a consciously love-hate relationship with it for fifteen years, like a bad family relationship. It's been very hard for me to accept the need to permanently separate the religious from the spiritual. A political community is not a sufficient substitute for a faith community.
RAPHAEL: It was about the same time that I started seminary, which also allowed me to look at the whole theological system, and come up with my own beliefs and my own answers to the question, where do I fit?
ANN: The conclusion I eventually came to was that I would be better able to focus on serving God if my needs for intimacy were being met. I did not choose to be homosexually oriented, but I did choose to seek a morally responsible way to respond to it.
