To Be Straight with You

Then you will return and discern between the righteous and the wicked, between those who serve God and those who do not. (3 Nephi 24:18)

That may be as close as I get today to engaging directly with the week's reading. There were a number of things that stood out to me from these chapters (3 Nephi 22-26) that I thought I might share in this week's post. But last night I had an experience that I need to reflect on.

Last night I went with one of my professors and a couple of other graduate students from my department to a performance by a British dance troupe (if that's the right word) called DV8. The performance, titled "To Be Straight with You," was billed as "a poetic but unflinching exploration of tolerance, intolerance, religion and sexuality." I tend to approach the contemporary arts with low expectations, and I have virtually no exposure to contemporary dance; so I went expecting something that was conceptually provocative—probably verging on gimmicky—but not likely to move me aesthetically.

The performance was much, much more engaging than I'd expected, and I'm very grateful I had the chance to see it. Basically, the troupe conducted hours of interviews with people in England—from big-name gay activists to people on the street—regarding their views on homosexuality, which often ended up involving religion. Many of the people they interviewed were from non-white immigrant communities. The troupe then plays what I presume are recordings from the interview, or in some cases the performers recite sustained quotations as monologues—and they dance to them, sometimes accompanied by impressive computerized special effects.

I'm not explaining this well (and the show's online trailer doesn't give you a good sense either, unfortunately). But the point I'm trying to get to is that the show was very enjoyable as an aesthetic experience—I would jump at a chance to see it again—but also very frightening in terms of what it conveyed about religious hostility toward gay/lesbian/bisexual/queer people. There were stories about people being beaten, stabbed, murdered by mobs—and these stories were taking place in Britain or in former British colonies like Jamaica. Muslims and Christians were the principal sources of the hostility. The impression the show conveyed is that fundamentalist Muslims would like to eliminate homosexuals by killing them while fundamentalist Christians want to accomplish the same end through therapy or exorcism.

Now I could launch into an argument on behalf of a more nuanced representation of Christian and Islamic attitudes toward homosexuality. (They don't all hate gay people, etc.) But the performance gave voice to truths, and I want to let those truths have their say. By the end of the show, I was thinking about the writing I've done on gay Mormon issues, and how in scholarly contexts I've made a point of divorcing my work from activist agendas in the name of critical understanding. After watching "To Be Straight with You," that pose of detachment feels icky. It feels like a betrayal, like I'm refusing to use my gifts and my voice to do something on behalf of people who are suffering. I come away feeling like: If I want my scholarship to be consecrated, doesn't it have to be activist?

And the show left me feeling vulnerable—like all the gains that have been made toward gay/lesbian equality in the modern West could be undone. That within my lifetime I could end up living under the same threat of violence that gay/lesbian people are currently living in places like Iraq, or Nigeria, or evidently in certain neighborhoods of London. Maybe it's an exaggerated concern. God knows I hope it is. But in any case, it's a selfish concern. Whether I'm in danger of that kind of violence in my future or not, there are people who are living it now. And that's what matters at that moment. That violence has to end.

The world needs a revival of liberal religion. Liberals in religious traditions need to fight conservatism and fundamentalism within those traditions. The problem, of course, is that "fight" is not a preferred liberal metaphor. But when you're faced with something like anti-gay violence, I don't know how else to frame the necessary response. Fundamentalism has declared war, and now we have somehow to defend ourselves—or rather, we have to defend those whom fundamentalists want to victimize.

Or, okay, here's a different frame. Liberal religion needs to missionize more assertively. It needs to convert the world. It needs to win souls away from the false religion of fundamentalism. At one point in "To Be Straight with You," projected graphics are superimposed onto a performer so that it looks like he's standing inside a globe, which he then spins around to map gay violence worldwide. By the time he's done, Europe, North America, and Australia have been painted green because they grant relative degrees of legal protection and equality to gay/lesbian people, while vast swaths of the global South, especially the Islamic world, are in red. So now think Daniel's vision: the green needs to roll forth like a stone cut from the mountain without hands until it fills the earth.

Mormonism teaches me to trust in a millennial vision. For me, at this particular moment, that means: Liberal religion can flood the earth. Anti-gay violence can be abolished. God wills it. God calls us, with the sound of a trump, by the raising of an ensign, to join him in working to make it happen. Are we listening?

The Mormon millennial vision involves visions of judgment poured out on the wicked. That part usually makes my liberal sensitivities squirm. But then, confronted with violent fundamentalisms I would not hesitate to call false religions, I find that those visions of judgment speak to me after all. I'm a liberal, not a radical, so I feel guilty about the fact that those visions speak to me. But if there's a context in which words like the following become truth, this is one of them:

No weapon formed against you will prosper; every tongue that reviles against you in judgment, you will condemn. This is the heritage of the servants of the Lord, and their righteousness is of me, says the Lord. (3 Nephi 22:17)