“I was ‘Miss Pompous’,” she says now. “I believed that anyone outside my tunnel-vision is not a good person, and I associate my anti-gay feelings with my religious upbringing. I just grew up that way.”
Robinson was raised Catholic, she said, and was “born again” in her 20s. Since then, she’s attended Nazarene, Methodist and Vineyard churches, but none of them helped her broaden her world view, she said.
So eight years ago, when her son Carl Schottmiller came out as a gay man during his senior year of high school, that world view was set askew, and it’s taken her a long time to come around.
“I cried for three months,” she said. “When I told my sister, she scoffed. ‘We knew since he was 5 years old,’ she said.
“So it was OK with my family. With my Christian friends, not so much. I only heard my son would burn in hell for his homosexuality.”
Schottmiller, now 26, said the conflict between Christianity and homosexuality drove him away from the church entirely.
“I am not a part of any organized religion,” he said in a telephone interview from California, where he is working toward a Ph.D. in culture and performance. “I would describe myself as a Christian, but a lot of Christians don’t feel that gay people can be a part of that.”
The controversy over the role of gays and lesbians in the church continues, as many Christians regard the lifestyle as sinful. But in recent years, some churches, such as the Presbyterian Church U.S.A., have changed their stance on homosexuality, allowing for gay and lesbian candidates to be ordained and supporting same-sex marriage. Eight years ago, the Episcopal Church selected its first openly gay bishop.
Schottmiller said that going through puberty, when he began to be aware of his sexual orientation, the things he was being taught went against what he was feeling.
“When I realized I was queer, there was a real conflict of interest there,” he said. “At the time, I pulled away from church because all I saw from the Christian perspective was there was no exceptions, just condemnation and judgment. I felt that it was impossible to be queer and a churchgoing Christian, so I pulled away.”
Robinson said that it took her three or four years to start accepting that her son was gay. She quit her job for a while to go back to school to get a degree in humanities to help her understand.
“I wrote a paper on things not to do when your child comes out,” she said, “since I did them all — even trying to have him brainwashed back to heterosexuality.
“I had a lot of guilt (when he came out) because I thought I made him gay because we did so much stuff together,” she said. “He was smart enough to recognize (my conflicts). He went down through the list of things he knew I would beat myself up over.
“He said he was afraid I wouldn’t love him because I was the most homophobic person he knew,” she said. “After three or four years, I started getting over it and became very proud of my son for becoming who he is.”
But the conflict between Robinson’s Christian faith and her son’s sexual orientation still gnawed at her.
Then, “Three months ago, I was reading the newspaper and saw a blurb about a symposium on ‘Homosexuality and the Bible,’ and thought I should take that because that was my whole dilemma,” she said.
That seminar was led by the Rev. Mike Underhill, pastor of the Nexus Church, which happened to meet just down the road a little from Robinson’s home in the East Butler YMCA, and eventually she started attending there, but it was the symposium that finally allowed her to reconcile her faith with her son’s sexual orientation.
Underhill was raised in the Methodist church, the son of a pastor, in Memphis, Tenn. When he was a young man in the 1960s, however, he pulled away from the church because he felt that Christianity was a conspirator in many of society’s ills.
“During the Vietnam and civil rights era, I saw at the time the church was part of the problem, not the solution,” he said. “They weren’t doing anything to change the situation.”
So he entered the corporate arena, and retired in his early 50s from Amoco, now part of BP, where he was the manager of global diversity.
“I had a wonderful job because I had a secular pulpit to speak about discrimination in the workplace,” he said. “I helped change some policies and made life better for a lot of people.”
After he retired, he finally answered the nagging call to the religious pulpit. Being an openly gay man, he was ordained into the United Church of Christ, a relatively new denomination made from “a lot of old German congregations coming together.”
“Coming out as a gay man encouraged me to come back to God,” he said. “That’s the way God created me. To acknowledge and celebrate that opens me to God’s call to life. Coming out allowed me that process. Some of the people who come to Nexus tell me about the experience they have that amounts to spiritual abuse, telling them that if you have enough faith, you wouldn’t be asking these questions.”
For example, a woman with a low singing voice was told in her previous church told her that if she were a better woman, she’d at least be an alto.
“The whole notion that she was not a real woman was spiritual abuse,” he said. “The same with divorced people, telling them that something is wrong with them, even if it was a woman in an abusive relationship, who might be told that they should try to remain in the relationship.”
He was assigned to the Nexus church about 18 months ago. The church had already been around a few years, the result of an effort by the UCC’s vision to plant a progressive church in the middle of conservative Butler County that would welcome gay and lesbian people of all ethnic groups “to lead a full life and leadership in the church.”
Underhill said there are around 80 people who affiliated with the church, which has Sunday attendance between 40 and 60 worshipers. Around 60 percent of them are gay and lesbian.
“My role as a pastor is more like that of a midwife,” he said. “We believe that all people are pregnant with possibilities with God and we challenge people to see what God is doing in your life.”
His class in “The Bible and Homosexuality,” which he presented three times in Oxford, has been a good tool to generate word of mouth interest in the Nexus Church.
“In all the Bible there are only six passages that are used to clobber gay people. In the workshop, we come together to read those six passages. When you sit down to read them yourself, people get a better understanding of what the passages are saying and what they are not.
“Today, sexual orientation is about love and a physical relationship. So we explore what exactly those passages are talking about. Are they spelling out what we understand about sexual orientation today? What it meant to have same-sex behavior then is quite different than anything we know about today.
Underhill said that the UCC is the first major denomination to ordain openly gay and lesbian people and to endorse marriage equality.
“There are many things prohibited in the Bible that most people would say are no longer applicable,” he said. “Eating pork, for instance. I call that ‘pick and choose’ fundamentalism.
When counseling people who have had a bad experience in a different church, Underhill focuses on assuring them of God’s abiding love.
“Usually, people will come out for mental health because when you’re trying to deny a huge part of what you are takes a lot of energy and is not healthy,” he said. “A lot of them who come here have begun the process, so it’s just a matter of supporting that.
“It’s really nothing to do with being gay and lesbian, but it’s a matter of exploring Gods presence in your life.”
While there may be other churches that are more accepting of gay and lesbian people, it is not written in their policies. The UCC, however, establishes in its constitution a Coalition for Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Concerns, whose job it is to actively work “to combat prejudice and seeks justice for, and the full inclusion and involvement of, lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgendered Christians in all expressions of the United Church of Christ.”
“We have straight people who come to Nexus because they want to raise their children in an accepting environment,” he said. “Being welcoming of gay and lesbian people in important to Nexus Church, but it does not define us. The Gospel according to Jesus Christ is continually our focus.”
But most mainstream denominations don’t agree with a blanket acceptance of homosexuality.
“Our stance is that you have to deal with the sin while being redemptive in our behavior toward the sinner,” said the Rev. Ken Dugas, pastor of the Allison Avenue Baptist Church in Hamilton. “Baptists would generally believe that homosexuality is wrong and anti-Bible.”
While on an individual basis, Baptists may have their own feelings of acceptance toward a gay or lesbian individual, but the church’s stance is pretty clear, he said.
“We have some families who have been touched by that, but we don’t have any openly gay members,” Dugas said. “That would be highly unlikely. Being a part of the congregation would mean that you would have to accept the teachings of the Bible and be baptized, and that would be a problem.”
Michael Graham, pastor of the Village Church, said, “As a church, we love gay people, we love adulterers and we love murderers. We love people who get it right and we love people who get it wrong.
“Gay people are welcome to come and hang out with us, but as far as being Christian and gay, we have issues with that because we believe it contradicts God’s word. We will treat (homosexuality) like any other sin that’s described in the Bible.
“You can be Christian and be gay just like I can cheat on my wife and be Christian, because it’s all part of the battles that rage in our hearts. But if you’re gay, you won’t be a Christian. If you’re a Christian, you don’t want to walk in that lifestyle. We have sinful hearts, but to be flamboyantly gay is to walk in that lifestyle, and the Bible has tension with that.”
While “loving the sinner and hating the sin” works well for the majority of Christians, Robinson found more comfort in Underhill’s message that the Bible can be interpreted in a number of ways based on linguistic and contextual analysis and that it may not be as condemning as other denominations believe.
“It was the most amazing symposium I’d ever heard in my life,” she said, and after hearing Underhill’s message and discovering that his congregation met just down the road from her house, Robinson started going there.
“I cried the whole time because it felt so comfortable,” she said. “Now I’m at a point where everything is very balanced and falling into place. I’ve never looked so forward to Sunday coming. Maybe it’s because I’ve never felt good enough about myself to belong to a church, even though I’m very conservative and it’s not a very conservative church. But now it makes sense to me that each person needs to be respectful for themselves and for others.”
Contact this reporter at (513) 820-2188 or rjones@coxohio.com.
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