Bishop Gene Robinson: Don’t be afraid of change. Photo: Reuters
Gene Robinson is used to threats. A fortnight after delivering the prayer invocation at President Barack Obama’s 2009 inauguration, he received a phone call from police.
”They’d arrested a man who had come through their town in such a rage that he’d shot the windows out of a parked empty police cruiser. Beside him in the passenger seat he had maps to our house, he had pictures of me and [my partner] Mark he’d gotten off the internet and he’d scrawled across it, ‘Save the Church, Kill the Bishop’. He had a sawn-off shotgun and tons of ammunition. The police were pretty certain he was on his way to blow our heads off.”
This is the ugly price of change. It is what happens when a man of the cloth refuses to segregate his sexuality from his faith.
On the day he was consecrated in 2003 – becoming the world’s first openly gay bishop in the Episcopal (Anglican) Church – Robinson wore a bulletproof vest.
His appointment sparked a spiritual crisis in the American church, dividing progressive and conservative Christians.
”You fornicating lecherous pig,” read one of the many death threats he received, prompting the FBI to place him under protection.
The threats have ceased but his quest to reform the church from the inside and deliver equality for all people of faith continues to face opposition.
On Wednesday, the 66-year-old retired bishop of New Hampshire will arrive in Australia to meet church leaders as part of a tour that he hopes will help mend the ”immense psychological and spiritual damage” religion has caused the gay and lesbian community.
His visit comes at a time when our own religious leaders are facing growing pressure to address high rates of suicide and self-harm among gay and lesbian parishioners.
Speaking exclusively to Fairfax Media in advance of his arrival, Robinson said that just as the church admitted it had been wrong to quote scripture to justify slavery, the time had come for it to concede it was wrong on homosexuality.
”I do believe that 95 per cent of all the discrimination that gay and lesbian, bisexual and transgender people have experienced is at the hands of religious people, and it’s going to take religious people to undo that damage,” he said. ”I think that it will not be too far in the future that we will see the church, the synagogue, the mosque, apologising for what we have done to gay and lesbian people, the way we apologised for what we did to black people during slavery and for what we’ve done to women over the ages.
”It’s already happening on a local basis in America. We are moving at such a rapid pace, perhaps unprecedented in any civil rights movement.”
Robinson is being brought to Australia by the Centre for Faith Life and Learning in Melbourne (a network of progressive Christians), and Paddington Uniting Church in Sydney.
Among his engagements is an appearance on ABC’s Q&A, where he hopes to also influence our politicians. He believes that Prime Minister Julia Gillard and Opposition Leader Tony Abbott are reluctant to act on marriage equality due to religion’s influence.
”The church’s position gives the politicians a strong piece of ground to stand on. We’ve found in America that clergy and lay leaders of congregation are enormously helpful in campaigns for marriage equality because we have been silent for too long and the conservatives have owned the airwaves and the newspapers as if they speak for all Christians and Jews and Muslims. The fact of the matter is they don’t and it’s time for right-minded religious people to stand up and be counted.”
Robinson, who wed his partner Mark Andrew in 2010, has two children with a woman he married in the 1970s. They divorced after 14 years but remain good friends. Their wedding came after he spent two years in a church ”conversion” program, trying to ”cure” his homosexuality.
He said religious ministries that try to change a person’s sexuality can do ”enormous damage to the soul”.
Last month, Fairfax Media reported on the suicide of Damien Christie, a 43-year-old carer who took his own life. He had undertaken ”reparative” therapy at a Melbourne Christian ministry several years earlier – an experience his friends said had deeply scarred him.
”The ramifications of believing that your own creator abhors something essential to the core of who you are is a devastating thing to overcome, and I don’t think people who have never been oppressed can understand the depth of the pain and distress that that causes,” Robinson said.
Despite the intimidation, Robinson is happy to now be living a life of integrity, and believes his work as a gay rights advocate is his calling.
”One of my messages when I visit Australia will be probably the most oft-quoted phrase in the Bible, which is, ‘Be not afraid’,” he said.
”That goes for politicians not being afraid to do the right thing, it goes for church people not being fearful to change their minds about something that they’ve been sure about for a long time, and to not be afraid to admit they’re wrong and discern God’s will on this.”
Author: Jill Stark
Publication: The Age
Publication Date: May 19 2013