In light of October being LGBT History Month, we will be watching the documentary Brother Outsider: The Life of Bayard Rustin for our next Living in the Tension community gathering on Monday, October 17th. We will meet at our regular location on 5255 N. Ashland Ave. in Chicago a little earlier at 6:45pm.

Bayard Rustin (pictured right with Philip Randolph on the cover of LIFE), who has been called the ‘Lost Prophet‘ by historian John D’Emilio, was a leader of the civil-rights movement. He organized the Journey of Reconciliation in 1947 with George Houser, which was the first of the Freedom Rides. Rustin also helped to organize the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (which he was later forced to resign from because of his sexuality) and he was the chief organizer of the March on Washington in 1963. Among other accomplishments, Rustin was also an influential voice early in the movement as he helped to spread the philosophy of nonviolent resistance among Martin Luther King Jr. (primarily in 1956 after taking leave from the War Resisters League) and other leaders after spending time with Gandhi’s movement in India (1948).

As Rustin’s political opponents often attacked him as being an immoral influence and he was even criticized by fellow pacifists and civil-rights leaders because he was an openly gay man, he rarely served as a public spokesperson. He rather acted as an influential adviser to civil-rights leaders and he decided to step away from the movement for a period as there was fear that the reactions of others to his sexuality could have a negative influence on the broader movement. Senator Strom Thurmond even produced an FBI photograph of Rustin talking to King while he was bathing to try to imply that a same-sex relationship existed between the two. They both denied the allegation, but criticism and stigma around Rustin’s sexuality continued to follow him.

Despite the climate of the day with regards to homosexuality and the criticism and accusations that he faced, Bayard Rustin made significant contributions to the civil-rights movement though his role and voice has commonly been written out of history books.

You can check out the trailer for the documentary below:

Much love.

www.themarinfoundation.org

A few days ago the BBC World News featured the work of The Marin Foundation in written and audio form! Above is a screenshot I took of the BBC’s home page on their website… And that’s us as the feature story! It’s been crazy since it went live. We have gotten tons of folks reaching out from all over the world. This impact of our story is being felt! It’s such a humbling thing to have happen, and it’s definitely surreal to know that our bridge building message is getting spread across the globe through the most internationally trusted media company in existence. Just unreal.

You can read the full article here

You can listen to the 30 minutes segment the BBC ran on us here (and you have about 30 days to download it to keep it if you want)

Yesterday I got an email from the BBC and they gave me the following, crazy, update about our stories since they went live:

—Our radio segment (which has also been featured throughout America on NPR) is the most listened to segment of any from the BBC World Service

—Our radio segment is the most downloaded segment of any from the BBC World Service

—Our article is the 2nd most shared article of any story on any of the BBC websites

—Our article is the 3rd most read article on any of the BBC websites

I have to thank Christopher Landau so very much. He was the producer of the segment, as well as the writer of the article. Christopher was the one who fought for this story to be done! Even after some higher-ups said no to his initial proposal, he kept at it over almost 1 full year (!!!!) before they finally said yes. And now look what is happening! Brenda and I first met Christopher while I was speaking in London earlier this year. He had read my book when it first released in 2009 and as he said, “kept it in the back of my head to do a story on it for just this time.”

I’m not the most trusting person when it comes to media folks… They never seem to quite tell the truth in how they are going to present or edit something. But Christopher did exactly what he said he was going to do. A stand up man. A balanced journalist. And now a person ever so dear to not only my heart, but the millions his work has reached around the world.

Just absolutely amazing what the Lord is doing with this.

No matter the outcome, faithfulness always wins out.

Much love.

www.themarinfoundation.org

The Future of this Bridge Building Work

There was one quick sentence that the reporter Heather Sells said in the segment that was quite profound:

“It may take years to understand Marin’s impact on the Church and the LGBT community”

How true that statement actually is. In today’s on-demand culture there is an expectation of the immediate. People can immediately get news in real time on Twitter before it actually airs on TV. People can immediately voice their opinions on blogs in the exact moment of reading something. We can call, email, etc from anywhere at anytime. Hyper-connected, I think, is the official geeky term for our lives today.

The operation of the Church has fallen into these exact same negative cultural patterns. These days churches are working off of a success or failure model. But what is success? How do you define it? Numbers? Programs? People ‘saved’ by praying a prayer? No matter what someone believes is the correct definition, it’s all relative.

And none of it carries any weight in my book anyway.

Here are some thoughts on Success and Failure when it comes to Christianity and building bridges between the Church and the LGBT community:

Faithful commitment is Success

What if a LGBT person never agrees with a conservative interpretation of Scripture? What if they accept Jesus Christ and then pronounce they are a gay Christian? What if they say they hear God clearly tell them that living in a same-sex, committed and monogamous relationship is a blessed, God-ordained way of life? From a conservative perspective,

Have you not done your job?

Did you fail?

Are you not fulfilling even the most baseline of Christian standards?

The answer is that a faithful commitment to God is a success no matter what the outcome. Proverbs 16:3 says: “Commit tot he Lord whatever you do and your plans will succeed.” The more accurate translation of Proverbs 16:3 is, “Commit to the Lord whatever you do and your plans will be established“.

Success in God’s eyes is completely different from our modern understanding of the term.

The fallout from this incorrect alignment leads to a creation of false expectations for ourselves in comparison to God’s biblical promises. There are two main Kingdom differences between establishing and succeeding:

Establishing is rooting your motives and actions in God’s unknown process.

Succeeding is beating the competition with perceived outcomes that the mainstream (whether secular or religious) deems worthy.

Establishing is the spiritual understanding that there is personal contentment in faithful commitment. This is not an excuse to be lazy but it is the Kingdom parallel to the flesh’s second version of succeeding -

Succeeding is having contentment in knowing the outcome.

Both the Church and the LGBT community set themselves up for this disconnect because we use a model of Success vs. Failure – a model created with the rise of an ‘advanced’ Western mindset of philosophy, evolution and business. Each of those cultural metrics have since led us further from Christ’s metric of success. Hence the reason LGBT activist groups and religous right activist groups won’t be caught dead longing to establish anything with the other – because they both are trying too hard to ’win’ the battle to see anything else.

The point of faith is not to beat up and conquer every other people group/belief system so we come out the ultimate winners. The point of faith is to establish Kingdom, here on earth as it is in Heaven, no matter what the outcome.

So do I know the outcome of what this bridge building work will look like in 40 years? Not that I know of. But 40 years down the road isn’t the point, and it’s not even in my remote focus. The point is to faithfully live out each day in relation to and relationship with those in my life, no matter what the outcome turns out to be four decades from now.

Faithful commitment is success. We will stop failing when we stop trying to succeed and start establishing Kingdom.

Much love.

www.themarinfoundation.org

Public Statement:

The work of The Marin Foundation is to build bridges between the LGBT community and a variety of faith communities through education, scientific research and diverse community gatherings. We are a movement shaped by bold individuals of reconciliation; whose orientation is one of love, who live in the tension of different social, theological and political ideologies, and refuse to allow hate, disagreements or past experiences cause division in any community.

Over the last ten years I have seen a growing difference between cultural reconciliation and actual reconciliation. Cultural reconciliation is when the conservative world or the LGBT community only sees reconciliation as ‘the other’ dropping their personal worldview and picking up a full set of ‘correct beliefs’ that brings everyone to only one side. To me that resembles more of a mob mentality than actual reconciliation—which seeks to connect and dignify two different groups of people on a human to human level whether in agreement or not. That is The Marin Foundation’s ultimate goal. We model this type of reconciliation everyday within our own organization on staff and in volunteers, which consist of straight and LGBT people, single and partnered, liberal and conservative.

Such an effort is a countercultural place to be, especially in light of the divisive culture war that continues to surround faith, politics and sexuality today. The Marin Foundation and I are making even more of an intentional effort to spend our energy, time and resources working with others from both the LGBT and conservative communities who yearn to see a true reconciliation happen on earth, as it already is in Heaven.

__________________________________________________________________________________________

In light of all the attention surrounding the talk I gave to a group of conservative youth pastors in the Fall of 2008, I want to answer some of the accusations. Despite my critics, from both the LGBT and conservative communities, accusations that I have things to hide (e.g. depending on what extreme you talk to I am either a person ‘pretending to be nice to LGBT people in order to make them straight’ or ‘I am a heretical emergent pastor who loves LGBT people’), I don’t have anything to hide. So I figured for the sake of those who do love our work and the sake of those who don’t, I will post my responses to the public accusations floating around:

To start off, I want to say that at that point in my ‘speaking life’ I was not anywhere close to being confident in the delivery of the bridge building message. Mostly, I was just scared out of my mind trying to figure out how to publicly speak to huge groups of people about such a divisive topic. I never had any intent to be the ‘evangelical’ go-to guy on this topic, I only cared about wanting to show love in a tangible way in my one neighborhood. When I listened to the recording from two years ago, I thought some of the same things as many of the critics out there; even cringing at times because I know what I was trying to communicate, but the delivery of it was anything but how I say it all today. Thanks to those who took the time to ask these questions:

Q1. You use the phrase ‘same-sex attraction’ and that is not liked within the LGBT community because it sounds like you don’t want to accept the word gay.

R1: I have never had any LGBT person say to me that they hate the term ‘same-sex attraction’. But now that I am hearing such a response I don’t want to offend anyone with that term (e.g. the same reason why I never use the word ‘homosexual’; instead using gay, gay and lesbian, or LGBT—as you can hear on the recording).

Q2. It sounds like you always make a distinction between being Christian and being LGBT as two separate entities of each other. There is such a group of people as gay Christians!

R2. To that particular audience of Southern, very evangelical youth pastors there is really no such thing in many of their minds as a gay Christian. For most of them to even hear those words put together is, as I’ve heard hundreds of times, “an oxymoron”. In general though, when I talk about Christians and the LGBT community (as I did in parts of my book as well - which is written for straight conservative evangelicals) I am referring to broader community generalizations within the culture war—not attempting to suggest that either of those groups are mutually exclusive (which many took it as…which if I could redo the talk and parts of my book, I would make much more clear today).

If conservative folks can’t get past the political culture war, how is culture going to change from its current divided and bitter state? I believe that it is on the conservative world to make that first step towards reconciliation instead of doing what they have traditionally done—wait for LGBT people to apologize first. LGBTs shouldn’t apologize first, they were not the ones to do the kicking out and disenfranchising. So I wanted to focus on that culture war aspect first. The ‘problem’ with such a focus on my part is that it does sometimes decentralize a focus on gay Christians, which is a legitimate group of people. Although there is a hugely growing gay Christian movement, from my experiences gay Christians still do not compromise a majority (51%) of the LGBT community as a whole. I have no proof of that statement, either…it’s just a perception of mine from being around the country so much. I could be wrong. Though I do believe that one day it will be the majority of the LGBT community, right now I don’t see that. Hence the reason why I usually separate the two when I speak about the divide, the culture war or traditionally held conservative or liberal paradigms. One other thing, when I say ‘whole of the LGBT community’ I am referring to the dominant entity under the umbrella. This doesn’t mean that I believe the opposite of gay Christian is drinking, partying, sleeping around, etc; because I don’t believe that. This just means the majority, in my opinion right now, would not identify themselves as gay Christians.

One other note, I do not believe that for every LGBT person, their identity equals sexual behavior (I could have made that distinction much more clear while talking; as well as made that much more clear in my book!). There is so much that makes up a complex human life. My ultimate goal, agenda if you so wish to label it, is to provide space for everyone to live the life they so desire to seek—with God, without God. Unashamedly, I do believe life with a belief in God is more complete, but that is what living in the tension is all about – what does it mean to have differences in ideologies and still be peaceful and productive in today’s culture… 

Q3. In the suicide note you read, it mentioned the options of celibacy or straight marriage with kids. Why isn’t the other choice (gay marriage) considered?

I think what everyone is forgetting is that I did not write that suicide note. That note was written by an out gay man who I had never met, didn’t know and who had just heard me on the radio with no where else to turn with his thoughts. So he sent his suicide note to me. I don’t know his life or his context other than what he wrote in that suicide note. Although he didn’t include all “options” of faith and sexuality in his letter, it is a powerful reminder to the conservative world that this is a life/death type of thing. To many in the conservative world, homosexuality needs to be humanized first before any bridge building can occur; because right now it’s a political battle. That is why I read that suicide note.

Funny to me, is that prominent LGBT activists read notes like that all of the time to get the same point across about the severity of this issue. But because it’s an LGBT person reading it people focus on the intent of the suicide rather than the minutia of how big of a field of faith and sexuality is included in such a note. I’m not upset about this…it’s just a fact. Also, I haven’t received too many suicide notes. In fact, when I spoke on the recording in question, as well as wrote my book later, that was the first and only one I had ever received to those points. So it’s not like I had a lot of suicide notes to choose from.

Q4. There is value in promoting celibacy until marriage (whether gay or straight), but it sounds like you were trying to keep LGBT youth in the closet because if they come out they will then have a ‘gay identity’ and you’re saying that is a bad thing.

R4. As for the chastity for LGBT teens until marriage/civil union/etc depending on the State if that is what they want to do—like straight teens—that is what I think is the prefered course from my Christian worldview. When I was describing the 13-15 year old window (bad, bad language on my part by the way—I have since stopped saying that as of last year), I was not telling those youth pastors to keep LGBT kids in the closet. As I said in the recording, it’s important for youth pastors to have such important discussions about faith and sexuality with their youth.

What I was trying to say was that when a 13-15 year old kid comes out, as research shows, (R.C. Savin-Williams & K.M. Cohen, “Homoerotic development during childhood and adolescence,” in M. Diamond & A. Yates (Eds.), Sex and Gender: Child and adolescent psychiatric clinics of North America (Philadelphia: Saunders, 2004), 529-550), they are then the singled out ‘gay kid’ for all time; even at the high school reunions 10+ years later. I don’t know many out gay kids that are treated really well in the rural South. It’s a big decision to come out. It’s more than just a huge step. It’s obviously life changing. My main point was to encourage those youth pastors to understand the harsh reality of what could potentially happen to these kids in their everyday/and church life (if there is a ‘church life’ after?) while going through this realization and coming out process. My statement to delay the coming out is to provide the needed space to realistically gauge the situation around them with as level of a head as possible. I have had many of my LGBT friends tell me they wish they would have waited to come out instead of just blurting it out and then being left alone on an island with no idea what to do from there.

When I said “it’s harder for kids to ‘come back’ after they are already out than it is to keep them in the fold”…I was referring to having a faith and living with a belief in God! I was not talking about behavior modification as many who have listened to it since assumed. Once again though, I could have definitely made that distinction more clear, especially in light of how it sounded when I listened to it for the first time two years later.

Q5. There doesn’t seem to be much intent from you for helping LGBT teens to be celibate to marriage, or even marry, as you sound like you’re encouraging those pastors to help the LGBT teens live in life long celibacy or becoming straight.

First, I will make this very clear: The Marin Foundation, its staff members and myself personally—our goal is not to have anyone who is LGBT become ‘straight.’ Never has been. Never will be. That is not our goal/agenda/secret agenda/whatever you want to call it. Everyone who knows us personally or has ever come to anything we have ever done backs that statement up. When speaking to a particular audience I, like any communicator, has to gauge where the audience is at and what they can handle in terms of the more liberal or conservative theologies that push against what that particular audience believes—otherwise you’ll just be quickly written off and the message won’t land – which is counterproductive to anyone trying to communicate a broader message, let alone one of a different medium of engagement.

I have been accused of ‘telling LGBT people what they want to hear and conservative people what they want to hear’. The answer to that is partially correct. I use the exact same Principles (e.g. Won’t answer yes/no, Principles of Bridge Building, etc) that communicates the exact same message no matter who the audience (and that includes the numerous non-Christian universities I have spoken at, which the audience consisted of liberal LGBT people and straight conservatives!), but the particulars of how/what I can push that audience on looks different.

But the main accusation coming from the recording is the ‘behavior modification’ – In light of the understanding (at least in my own head) that I was not talking about behavior modification (point 4 above), but rather about faith, that all made sense to me as I said it at the time.

Q6. It sounds like you might have some clandestine desire to see married LGBT couples with kids break up and eventually settle down with straight opposite sex people.

R6. I recently wrote the following to a gay person I know who emailed me with questions about some of the accusations:

I want to make this as clear as I possibly can: I have no intent, ever, public or private, to ever see you and your partner divorce/separate/break-up/not live a happy life. You are great parents to the great kids you have adopted, who without you, would not have the ability to live the life they are living. I couldn’t be more humbled to know you, your husband and your kids as the family that you are.

Q7. You describe, when one of your best friends came out, that he became freakish: “lost a bunch of weight…got the little ‘fauxhawk’…started acting effeminate, talking effeminate…the stereotypical flaming gay guy.”

R7. First, I never used the word freakish, or any other insulting adjective. Second, there was absolutely no judgment in what I said. I was describing the change in physical appearance. That was not a judgment statement, it was a fact of very noticeable features changing before coming out and after coming out. Another fact I should point out is that there is such a thing as a stereotypical flaming gay guy—of which, right or wrong, is well recognized by LGBT people, the mainstream world and the religious world. I also have a fauxhawk

I talk extensively in my book, Love is an Orientation, about the need to deconstruct those negatively imputed cultural stereotypes—about LGBT people and about conservatives. At that point in my life in the year 2000, as a bible-banging homophobe when he came out to me, what I communicated to that audience was the dead honest truth about what was running through my head when I saw him for the very first time after he got back from college after he came out. 

Q8. You said: “What if you’re asked if people can change their sexual orientation?” Your answer: Be evasive.

R8. That wasn’t my only answer. Here is what I meant by ‘evasive’: First, I used really, really bad language when I said the word evasive. As I said in my opening statement, I was not accustomed to speaking and had not found a comfortable way to communicate the following:

“Don’t answer yes/no questions because the people asking them (“whether friends or enemies” were the exact words I used) are just trying to pin you down into a ‘my team’ ‘their team’ scenario.” Bridges can’t be built from only one side! The problem with close-ended questions is that in a one word response three things happen: I know who you are, I know what you believe, and (this is the big one) I know how I should treat you based on that one word. None of that seems peaceful and productive to me surrounding the most divisive topic in our culture today. That is why I don’t answer yes/no questions, whether to friends I love and trust or to those who don’t like me so much. You can see more about what I believe it means to live in the tension of the cultural, political and theological polarization in my book.

Another thought: When I listed the groupings of people that consist of faith and sexuality in our culture today answering the question about “change”, they were exactly that—groupings. I said it then, I made it very clear in my book, and I’ll say it again here: Those groupings are not a ‘change or step program to go from gay to straight’! They are rather a categorical list of all the different shades of faith and sexuality in today’s culture. A categorical grouping is not a moral or social judgment statement; it’s just an informational list of how different people in our culture today self-identify regarding faith and sexuality.

Q9. You were asked a question from the audience: What do you do when you encounter a gay youth who thinks he or she could be Christian and also openly gay or lesbian? Answer: There’s “hope” for someone like that because it’s hard for youths to realize at 15 what life might be like at 35, when they can’t get married or have kids — implying gays shouldn’t/can’t get married or have children as adults — so give them the “big picture,” of what it might be like at 35, but whatever you do, DON’T mention sexuality!

First, in 2008 there was only 1 (one) State that gay marriage was legalized, Massachusetts. So unless every single LGBT person moved to Massachusetts, at that time the talk was recorded in the South, no, there would be no gay marriage with kids. I was again stating a fact. Today, that response is different. I honestly believe gay marriage will be nationally legalized sooner than later. Within that thought process, my message to the conservative world is: When it is legalized across the country, are you just going to continue to fight or are you going to learn what it means to live peacefully and productively within a society that has legalized gay marriage?

Also, when I said ‘don’t mention sexuality’, I was once again referring to the main issue of focusing on having an identity in Christ (I remind you that I was talking to a group of conservative pastors). Sexuality is such a huge topic with teenagers, whether straight or gay, that it is easy to get caught up in mainstream’s ideal (by mainstream I mean both secular and religious mainstreams) of what is sexually acceptable, in either direction, that youth can quickly fall into the extreme right or left categories. The extremes are what I feel are not productive and further perpetuate this culture war. Instead, living a spiritually fulfilled life (whether gay or straight), from my perspective, should be the goal of where to land on the cultural spectrum of faith and sexuality.

Q10: It is really narcissistic to name an organization after yourself!

If you know me, you know that I am a few things that don’t compute with others my age: 1) I am not technologically advanced – I know nothing of computers, design, Macs and the rest of it; and 2) I am not clever with slogans, marketing, etc. The reason I ended up naming my organization The Marin Foundation is because when I was trying to think of a cool, clever name, every name I thought of would I ask my LGBT and conservative straight friends what they thought of it, and every time they could think of a reason why LGBT or conservative people wouldn’t want to have anything to do with us just based on the name being either too Christianeze or too gay. The last thing I wanted was for someone to write us off just based on a name. So the most bland name I could think of that no one would have a clue what we did unless they actually knew what we did, was to call it The Marin Foundation. We are a registered 501(c)(3) non-profit. We are not a family foundation that was birthed out of a trust fund. Far from it (please see the link below about our financial records). Interestingly enough, it was a gay man in his 50′s that thought it would be a good idea to call my organization The Marin Foundation. Who knew that name would cause so many problems?

Q11. You lied when you said The Advocate article about you was retracted. What else are you lying about?

I was under the impression that The Advocate article was retracted. Please take my sincerest apology for publicly saying that it was retracted when it wasn’t. I want to thank The Advocate for going on the record and clearing that up. In regards to the article in question, I received two phone calls, one email and one letter from four different people quoted in that article who all stated they did not say any of what was quoted in the article by the author. To me, even today, that is enough to be satisfied whether the article was retracted or not.

I have never sought out one speaking engagement. I have never written one book proposal. I have never contacted any media outlet to cover us. All of these things have been brought to me. If I never get one more speaking engagement, write one more book or have one more media outlet cover us (whether positive or negative), I would still be content. I’m not here, and it was never my goal, to be a national leader or talking head. It is what it has become today. I’m just trying to continually learn how to live and love in real time; just now it’s in the public eye. It’s not easy. It doesn’t always work out how everyone would like it to. It’s quite uncomfortable. But it is what I’m committed to; in the public eye or not. I will never be above saying I’m sorry or admitting mistakes, as I have done numerous times on my blog and while teaching.

As I have always stated, I have nothing to hide about anything. That transparency also includes all of The Marin Foundation’s finances; of which are all public record through the IRS (as that seems to now be a hot topic that my organization is a cover to make me rich). If you don’t feel like chasing down the IRS, just let me know and I’ll post them all for everyone to see. If there is anything else, please let me know and I will freely communicate about it all. (Note to recently frequent commenter Eugene, I have not forgotten your questions, I will be getting to them, along with every single other question, as soon as I can).

Much love.

Andrew

PS – I have turned the comments off because this is a public statement in response to those accusing me of things. Thank you for understanding and letting my words stand by themselves.

Here’s Part 1

We then started to talk about sexual consumerism—no, not human trafficking, but rather sexuality being consumed to fuel one’s self worth and give them validity as ‘fully human’. So often people feel that they cannot be ‘fully human’ living in the way God created us as sexual beings without the ‘sexual’ part. But what so many miss is that God didn’t create us to idolatrize sexuality, but to be conformed to His image. And if His image was made manifest in Jesus, and Jesus was single (and peep this from the Book of Isaiah), what’s the deal with the world today?

Culture (Mainstream: Christian and secular) look to marriage as the end-all-be-all of ideal human sexuality (gay and straight). In his book, The Rise of Christianity: How the Obscure, Marginal Jesus Movement Became the Dominant Religious Force in the Western World in a Few Centuries, sociologist Rodney Stark notes that in 59 BC Julius Caesar secured legislation that awarded land to fathers of multiple children, and Cicero fought to outlaw celibacy. Then in the year 9 AD emperor Augustus passed laws that:

*Gave political preference to men who fathered three or more children

*Imposed political and financial sanctions upon childless couples, unmarried woman over the age of twenty, and upon unmarried men over the age of twenty-five

Stark goes on to document how each successive emperor after Augustus added additional perks for married couple with children and additional penalties for unmarried people and married couples without kids.

Here’s my problem—during Jesus’ time and the disciples time after that, marriage, in their culture, was being stripped from a God-honoring covenant to a legally sanctioned relationship with political and financial gains associated with said relationship.

At that moment, sexuality and marriage, became a product to consume to give worth. It’s a shame that mindset has lasted so long.

Much love.

www.themarinfoundation.org

Earlier this month President Obama appointed Amanda Simpson as the Senior Technical Advisor to the Department of Commerce. This is such a big deal because Simpson is the first ever transgender person to receive a Presidential appointment. Most of you have probably heard about this appointment already. I waited to comment on this situation because I wanted to see how the Christian and the secular media would react. Here are a few thoughts:

Broadly speaking, as liberal as the mainstream media is, I was shocked at how derogatory some of the outlets were regarding Amanda Simpson’s appointment. Names such as “tranny” and “gal” were written in some not-so-subtle condescending ways. I believe this highlights a lot larger transgender push-back within society.

As much as the mainstream world says they’re ok with gays and lesbians, this is just another reminder of how transgenders are still a huge unknown. While I was speaking at the general session at Ball State University last week, a student came up to the front of the auditorium to ask a question and said:

“I’m transgender and I don’t feel like I belong anywhere. Although I feel love from the Spectrum (the gay group on campus), they still don’t understand me, and there is no one around like me. I feel so alone. Christians don’t understand, the gay community doesn’t understand. What am I supposed to do?”

Wow! The boldness it took for this person to stand up in front of a packed auditorium to communicate such a message was one of the most sacred and special moments I have experienced in a long time. I wish I had a great answer to the questions, but I didn’t. As honestly as I could communicate it, I believe peace and reconciliation can only come through Christ, along side a loving community of people to hold you up when you can’t hold yourself up anymore. It was an unsatisfying response, but it was all I could muster for something I really know nothing of.

As for the Christian world’s response to this appointment, I am not surprised about (generally) their vocal, slippery-slope-driven reactions. However, what does continue to surprise me is the question of why Christians are always so surprised by such things!

We do not live in a Christian society no matter how many of us like to think the opposite. Ours is that of God’s Kingdom; something we are commissioned to bring here to our world. However, our world is governed by a secular culture that governs in a secular fashion. Yet we still continue to place our worldview upon them, expecting that one day they will ‘wake up’ and see the boundaries we are placing upon them to be able to productively work with us. That is not going to happen. Instead, let us continue to hold on to our belief and start working within the mainstream worldview that has been placed upon us; to figure out how to peacefully and productively bring our Kingdom within the structure we have been given. Or, we could just keep expecting something different to happen by doing what has always been done? You know, whichever you think is best.

I urge you brothers and sisters, take the structure that has been given to us and work to find a way to bring Kingdom to that—not working to try to have Kingdom rule and dominate a culture unwilling to allow such a thing to happen.

What are your thoughts?

Much love.

www.themarinfoundation.org

Have you ever wondered how one formulates a belief? I’ve been thinking about this recently and I think I’ve finally formulated my belief on how one formulates a belief. 

I feel that belief formulation is so important because it’s a key component to cracking, constructing and deconstructing the broader cultural psyche and therefore, cultural trends within. This could play a huge part in the next decade to ending culture wars and bringing on more tangibly productive works on earth as for the Kingdom. As everyone starts to cognitively and experientially work within a similar framework that provides space to exhibit free will in a new medium of engagement, I think what was once negatively imputed systems of thought and actions can quickly turn to peaceful and healthy positives ones.

I’d seriously love to hear your thoughts about what I think, and what you think on how one formulates a belief:

1. Wholistically having knowledge of, and being fully informed about a topic (I am defining ‘knowledge’ as: A solid intellectual understanding from both ends of the spectrum).

2. Humbly living within your intellectual and experiential exploration of the topic, providing space for those who socially, scientifically and theologically disagree to enter into your context.

3. Prayerfully coming to a conclusion through (in this order): the Word, church tradition, current cultural contexts and your experiences with each of those.

And from a Secular formation of a belief (as I am not naive enough to believe the broader secular world would entertain placing upon themselves a Christian worldview):

1. Wholistically having knowledge of, and being fully informed about a topic (I am defining ‘knowledge’ as: A solid intellectual understanding from both ends of the spectrum).

2. Humbly living within your intellectual and experiential exploration of the topic, providing space for those who socially, scientifically and theologically disagree to enter into your context.

3. Coming to a conclusion through the wholistic knowledge (intellectually and experientially from both sides) of current cultural contexts (religious and secular) within your personal experiences of those who agree and disagree with you.

From here, I feel that the medium of engagement can’t help but shift. Thoughts?

Much love.

www.themarinfoundation.org

For the next four days I am in Atlanta speaking to a couple thousand of my closest youth worker friends at Youth Specialties. I’m kicking this trip off today by speaking for a total of 4 hours (Research for a  Productive Generation (because I’m really tired of research just being used as ammunition) and Answering the Tough Questions on Sexual Identity), 2 book signings and a couple meetings. So here is a quick thought for the day:

Here is Part 1 

Levi-Strauss, the father of Structural Anthropology, twice, referenced the following quote regarding the human mind’s quest for order:

“Since, after all, the human mind is only part of the universe, the need to find order probably exists because there is some order in the universe and the universe is not chaos” (p. xi and p. 13).

I found this quote thought provoking because although Levi-Strauss is coming from a secularist point of view, his quest is to explain humanity’s innate yearning to find meaning and purpose/order within a chaotic world—the reason why religion is such a prominent construct, and has been throughout history. I get a kick out of realizing that the ultimate answer to this structural anthropologists question is the Answer found in Christ Jesus. Humanity can rationalize or research anything to the point they feel as though it is understood (or not, as Levi-Strauss admits: “Every myth is driven by the obsessive need to solve a paradox that cannot be solved.”), but the unchanging depth of our Lord is still profound centuries later. There is order to the universe—and something had to create it.

As a famous evangelist says, “When people today look at a house, they innately know someone built it. They don’t just think it was created without planning and structure; like it just somehow became a house. They would never live in such a place.”

Much love.

www.themarinfoundation.org

I recently read Myth and Meaning: Cracking the Code of Culture by Claude Levi-Strauss—the ‘father’ of Structural Anthropology—which is defined as: The quest for the invariant; or for the invariant elements among superficial differences (p. 8). In essence, this means that structural anthropology is searching for the changeless or constant qualities, functions, configurations or systems that bring order or understanding to an ever changing and chaotic world.

From a Christian worldview we would say that quest is simple—it starts and ends with God. However the fascinating part to structural anthropology is that it’s a secular field with spiritual undertows. Thus the invariant, though faith is recognized as a key stabilizer, can be ultimately constructed scientifically as well. Levi-Strauss brings up some fascinating philosophical and social points, and I would love to have further discussions about them because I feel they can greatly assist our own wholistic understanding of people and structures within culture.

Case: Philosophically Levi-Strauss believes in mythemes: that innate to humanity is the need for people to split everything in twos such that this dualistic grid is the most effective way for people to integrate cognitive data into personal action. He explains this with “each dualism produces a tension that seems to be resolved by a third party, mediating term, but that new terms turns out to be only ½ of a newly created dualism” (p. vii).

Ultimately, and here is the big point, “We are split creatures literally by nature, and we organize data like a simple digital machine. Our common sense is binary, the simplest and most efficient way to process experience seems to be by dividing it in half, and then to divide the halves in half, reformulating every question so that there are only two possible answers to it, yes or no” (p. viii-xi).

Wow! He just put a philosophical construct to exactly what I believe (and what Jesus taught) about yes/no questions (see the first part of the video below).

A few key points, as the implications to general humanity are greater than we ever thought:

1. Humanity works in cognitive rationalizations that naturally divide and subdivide any given topic into a base-level yes/no construct.

2. Yes/no allows us to then wrap our minds around intertwined constructs that we don’t fully understand or are not able to fully grasp. In other words, this cognitive process takes our mind from the confusion or fear of the ‘unknown’ to the comfort of the ‘known’ – or at least to the comfort in a feeling of ‘ability to handle’.

3. The problem with this innate action is that every situation in life (social, cultural, spiritual, personal, communal) then automatically becomes an ‘us vs. them’ scenario of ‘right vs. wrong’ or ‘good vs. bad’ or ‘success vs. failure’ and on and on. The dualism is what drives us crazy, and yet this paradigm (secular and Christian) is the fundamentally accepted means of reasoning because it brings recognizable insulators and boundaries to our ability to live and make choices. But a house divided against itself cannot stand—the reason humanity continues to plummet into self-selected and socially constructed secular categories, communities and religious denominations that have clearly defined delineations between the next.  

Now we are being shown the depth of God’s upside down Kingdom.

1. In the Old Testament, the baseline of the Hebrew faith (and of Jews today) is the Shema (Deut 6:4-9):

 ⁴ Hear, O Israel: The LORD our God, the LORD is one. ⁵ Love the LORD your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength. ⁶ These commandments that I give you today are to be upon your hearts. ⁷ Impress them on your children. Talk about them when you sit at home and when you walk along the road, when you lie down and when you get up. ⁸ Tie them as symbols on your hands and bind them on your foreheads. ⁹Write them on the doorframes of your houses and on your gates.

2. Read this carefully: “The Lord our God, the Lord is one.” The core of the Old Testament is God reminding humanity that He is One, unified, in direct opposition to inherent human cognition that can’t help but to divide and subdivide life, faith and experiences.

3. God then reminds us to impress this upon our children with constant reminders so that they will grow up not imputing subdivision, but rather Oneness is the Father.

4. Jesus then reminds us of this when asked what are the two greatest commandments, and also practices for us how not to answer yes/no to yes/no questions (see p. 178-185 in Love is an Orientation) in order to draw closer to God’s desired Oneness for humanity, in direct opposition of not only our fallen nature but also to our imputed understanding of engagement. What is so unique about this is that it doesn’t matter if it’s a Christian or not—the imputed baseline means of human reasoning are the same for everyone.

Conclusion: Living our life and faith in culture means that we must intentionally fight against the inborn human nature that pulls us towards the comforted subdivision of cognition rather than God’s ideal of Oneness—which often leads to living in faithful tension. As counterculture as this might be for humanity (especially Christians), looking at structural anthropology through God’s lens makes a whole lot of sense in regards to innate human nature and the philosophical understanding that comes because of it.

Much love.

www.themarinfoundation.org