Episcopal Chaplain at Boston University
Many have now condemned comments made last week by Justin
Welby, the Archbishop of Canterbury, linking the Church’s support of LGBT
people with the murders of Christians in Nigeria. In a phone-in radio interview Welby described
the murderers’ rationale: “If we leave a Christian community here we will all
be made to become homosexual and so we will kill all the Christians." He
continued, “I have stood by gravesides in Africa of a group of Christians who
had been attacked because of something that had happened in America.”
John Aravosis boiled Welby’s logic down to this: “he said that Anglicans must discriminate
against gays, lest bigots in Africa think Anglicans themselves are gay, and
then gay-bash them."
I stumble over all of this.
How The Episcopal Church’s embrace of LGBTI people can be condemned by
conservatives and lampooned by anti-religious commentators in the same moment. How
in the headlines of this story, Nigeria becomes “Africa” writ large, as if all
African countries are interchangeable.
How race, religion and sexuality are pitted against one another, as if one
could never be LGBTI, Christian, and Nigerian at the same time.
If justice is not to be rejected, if righteousness is not to
be rebuffed, if the public square is to become a place of authentic encounter
and learning, then the complex intersections of human lives must be upheld,
even if they confound the categories that so many prefer to keep separate.
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