Over the past few weeks, I’ve received some criticism from conservative Christians who are concerned about what I’ve written on this blog. Mostly their criticisms boil down to a single point: they accuse me of fixating on stories of failure within Side B (Side B is the belief that gay sex is not God’s design for humanity and therefore sinful.) They want me to give Side B a more positive spin. They are afraid that my story will aid the progressive and cultural bias against celibacy and the traditional ethic.
The short answer to this criticism is that I’m not the campaign manager for Side B. That’s not my job. My job is taking ownership of my own story. My job is creating a space where others can feel free to take ownership of their story, too, and that freedom certainly includes those who have chosen Side B. I’ve made it clear that I do not believe celibacy is wrong and that I am not here to tell people what they should or should not believe. I’ve made it clear that there are many people who experience joy and fulfillment within celibacy, but that I am not one of them.
It is also my job to ask hard questions. I do not raise these questions to give fuel to this already bloody war, but to allow us to engage in the spiritual discipline of questioning. Ultimately, this uncomfortable discipline will help us to reflect more deeply the person of Christ.
But there is a deeper reason why I tell the stories of failure, and that is because I don’t believe the Side B community or traditional church are listening to the stories of failure the way they should. In my experience the church celebrates the success stories while ignoring the stories of failure, and I have witnessed the horrific consequences.
My dear friends Rob and Linda Robertson lost their gay son to a drug overdose. They write at length about Ryan’s life, death, and their journey through grief and love on their blog, Just Because He Breathes. As I listen to their story, what strikes me isn’t what went wrong but what went right: the Robertsons were extraordinarily good parents to Ryan. They were not neglectful, absent, abusive, overly demanding, or religious fundamentalists. They were, and are, astonishingly good parents whose love for their children resonates in their every word.
Rob and Linda didn’t kill Ryan. Instead, ideas initiated the ferocious spiral that ultimately ended his life. He internalized the message that same sex attraction is a sin. Motivated by his deep desire to follow God, Ryan entered the ex-gay world to try to change his orientation. When he started to realize that change was not going to happen, he sank into a destructive despair. He left the ex-gay world behind but held onto the traditional ethic and attempted to choose celibacy. At the age of seventeen, he was forced to confront a life without marriage, sexual intimacy, or a family. He gave up on faith, ran away from home, and developed a mighty drug addiction to compensate for the shame. That drug addiction ultimately ended his life. He ingested the message that life without a partner was his only option. Without the freedom to ask hard questions in the context of grace, this deeply conflicted young man turned to the drugs that, ultimately, killed him. I resonate with Ryan’s story. When I reflect on my teenage years and early 20′s, I know that only a miracle kept the battle from taking my life as it took Ryan’s.
There are other stories that haunt me, stories that I do not have permission to tell: stories of suicide attempts, depression, compartmentalization, cutting addiction, drug abuse, HIV/AIDS, and ferocious sexual addiction. These are the stories of people I love, people I call friends. Almost invariably, the destruction they experience is a result of struggling with a lack of options. Most of them believe that the God they love demands automatically that they renounce romantic love forever, and most of them experience a breaking point when that denial finally crushes them.
Let me be clear: until we start engaging with these stories, the Ryans of the world are going to keep dying. As long as we celebrate the success stories but ignore or marginalize the stories of failure and tragedy, nothing will change. Frankly, I believe we are afraid of engaging with these stories because we are afraid we don’t have a solution. The problem with this unwillingness to acknowledge failure until we have all the answers is that only walking through darkness, uncertainty, and helplessness will yield answers.
By and large, the Side B community is deeply invested in academia. They discuss spiritual friendship and ancient ideas of love and chivalry. They search for answers in ancient Latin and Greek texts, they draw inspiration from the monastics and ancient Catholic and Orthodox traditions. They denounce the idolatry of marriage and argue that there is more to life and love than the erotic and romantic. Their public discussions have to do with cultivating abundant and sustainable celibacy.
In an attempt to advise and encourage those trying to live out celibacy, Side B Christians often offer suggestions for handling the pain. They say things like, “If you find a good community, celibacy is possible,” or, “If you put all your focus into your relationship with Christ, you will find fulfillment,” or, “Don’t idolize marriage so much.” While this is good advice, the underlying message is that, with the right mindset and under the right circumstances, celibacy will be sustainable for everyone.
In other words, try harder. Pray more. Connect with the right people. Do the right things in the right way with the right attitude, and it will all come together. But the truth is, people fail even when they follow the right formula. People experience promiscuity or compartmentalization, despair, and shattering pain even when they have an abundant relationship with God, even when they pray the right prayers, even when they have the friends to carry them through, even when they are striving for all the right things. Then, when people try all these things and still reach their breaking point, they meet with condemnation and hear that they need to try harder. This is why people commit suicide.
The common Side B reflection and advice are vital to our conversation about sexuality and relationships, but often do little to help the seventeen year old wondering if he will ever have someone to hold his hand. Discussions on public forums are necessary, but are incomplete when they never tell the stories of failure or express the very natural grief that may come with renouncing the possibility of marriage and family. Most importantly, the traditional community needs to allow space for authentic questioning without judgment, even if that space allows other traditionally-minded Christians to contemplate Side A. God is big enough to handle our questions.
We need something better. And the only way we are going to get it is by staring, unflinchingly, into the stories of failure. The cost of ignoring failure is too great. We are in danger of perpetuating a model that we all know too well: the ex-gay model of celebrating a few success stories and ignoring the stories of destructive agony. We need to stop trying to marginalize stories of Side B failure by redirecting people to the stories of success. We need to stop trying to make Side B more presentable to the wider world. We need to stop telling people that they failed because they didn’t try hard enough.
Just listen.
