Joshua I Wenzel. Church History. Volume 88, Issue 3. September 2019.
The traditional narrative of religion and the gay rights movement in the post-1960s United States emphasizes conservative Christians and their opposition to gay rights. Few studies focus on the supportive role Christian leaders and churches played in advancing gay rights and nurturing a positive gay identity for homosexual Americans. Concentrating on the period from 1977 to 1993 and drawing largely from manuscript collections at the Minnesota Historical Society, including the Minnesota GLBT Movement papers of Leo Treadway, this study of Christianity and gay rights in the state of Minnesota demonstrates that while Christianity has often been an oppressive force on homosexuals and homosexuality, Christianity was also a liberalizing influence. Putting forth arguments derived from religious understandings, using biblical passages as “proof” texts, and showing a mutuality between the liberal theological tradition and the secular political position, the Christian community was integral to advancing gay rights and liberation in Minnesota by the early 1990s despite religious right resistance. These efforts revealed a Christianity driven to actualize the love of God here on earth and ensure human wholeness, freedom, and an authentic selfhood. Christian clergy, churches, and ordinary persons of faith thus undertook activity in three areas to ensure wholeness and freedom: political activity for civil protections; emotional, pastoral care for persons with AIDS; and as a source of self-affirmation and social comfort in the midst of an inhospitable society.
On April 25, 1978, the residents of St. Paul, Minnesota went to the polls to decide if the 1974 amendment to the city’s human rights ordinance that protected gays and lesbians from discrimination in employment, public accommodation, and housing would be repealed. St. Paul was among the first municipalities in the United States to pass a gay rights ordinance, coming five years after the 1969 Stonewall riots in New York and the emergence of the modern gay rights movement. This movement not only pushed for civil rights for gays and lesbians but also liberation and the ability to be open about one’s sexuality and still be physically and emotionally safe in society. The 1978 push for repeal in Minnesota’s capital city of St. Paul—which along with its twin city of Minneapolis formed a major metropolitan area in the midwestern United States—was inspired by singer and conservative Christian Anita Bryant and her Save Our Children campaign in Dade County, Florida, where on June 7, 1977, voters in the Miami area overturned a gay rights ordinance county commissioners had passed in January. Bryant’s anti-gay rights mobilization—what she called a “God and decency crusade”—was part of the larger rise of the religious right in the 1970s and 1980s through which conservative Christians and leaders, such as Jerry Falwell and James Dobson, asserted themselves in the political arena and worked to align public policy with their fundamentalist Christian understanding. In alliance with the Republican Party, the religious right agenda was framed in terms of traditional family values that placed the heterosexual couple as the foundation of civil society, with the male as the family’s God-given head. Their platform included opposition to women’s rights, abortion, pornography, secular humanism, and sex education, in addition to an explicit enmity towards homosexuality and gay rights.
The gay rights debate in the post-1960s United States demonstrated Americans’ Christian convictions as well as the role of religion in America’s democratic public space. For some ordinary Americans and religious leaders, faith guided their position, with scripture serving as evidence. Other Americans invoked church-state separation when it came to determining civil protections for gays and lesbians and emphasized secular reasoning. The 1978 St. Paul campaign to repeal the gay rights ordinance exemplified this religious affect, and a group of eighty students, faculty, and administrators of Luther-Northwestern Theological Seminaries provides an example. In a statement before the vote, they made known their position on the proposed gay rights repeal. Addressing “our brothers and sisters in Christ,” they maintained that their stance had “strong Biblical support, not only in specific ‘proof’ texts, but in the larger themes and messages of the Bible.” They proceeded to offer a biblical passage impelling their position: “He has shown you what is good,” Micah 6:8 read. “And what does the Lord require of you, but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God.” And the position they called on their “brothers and sisters in Christ” to take was to oppose the repeal of gay and lesbian rights in St. Paul.
This is a study about Christianity and its liberalizing influence on issues pertaining to homosexuality in the last quarter of the twentieth century. In Minnesota from the late 1970s to the early 1990s, a coordinated Christian movement of theologically liberal clergy, lay leaders, churches, and Christian-affiliated organizations worked to advance gay civil rights, foster personal affirmation and social comfort for gays and lesbians, and provide pastoral care to gays and lesbians with AIDS. These Christians—who were mostly from mainline Protestant denominations but also included Catholics and members of gay-affirming churches—wrote letters to legislators, testified to legislative committees, provided public statements of support, collaborated with politicians, lobbied religious peers, and preached to congregations to promote civil protections for gays and lesbians. Moreover, civil protections, along with inclusive church services and ministries, Bible studies, educational forums, public statements of support, supportive sermons, and newspaper editorials nurtured increased social acceptance for gays and lesbians and a positive understanding of homosexuality—for homosexuals and heterosexuals alike—within a society that often demeaned and degraded gays and lesbians.
The words and actions of this Christian community in support of gay rights and liberation aligned with a liberal theological tradition in the twentieth century that acknowledged God’s presence on earth, working through individuals to engender a just society of human wholeness and personal freedom. The key to being whole and free was the ability to be your authentic self—as God created you. This authentic selfhood was not selfish, however, but was generated through a dignified relatedness with others, with God, and with oneself, in which God’s love was elemental. “Jesus came to the whole world for all of humanity, to all kinds of people … to love them and receive them as human beings,” declared pastor John H. Kemp in a 1978 sermon at St. Anthony Park United Church of Christ, one week before the April vote to repeal the gay rights ordinance in St. Paul. In a sermon that was implicit yet clear in its opposition to the gay rights repeal, Kemp referenced the apostle Paul and implored his congregants to seek wholeness in their lives and “put on love” in their relations with others. It is love, he said, “which binds everything together in perfect harmony.” Leo Treadway, a Lutheran, lay minister, gay man, and movement leader in Minnesota, further explained this relationship-oriented theology:
One of the great themes of the New Testament is the fellowship which exists between Christ and those around him. Constant reference is made to this relationship: “I am the vine and you are the branches” … You cannot be a Christian without fellowship, without brotherly relation in which you act out of love. Christ has given us the commandment to love one another even as he has loved us—as he is our brother, so are we all brothers of one another.
Treadway led or was connected to most of the religious outreach and organizing work for gay rights in Minnesota from the late 1970s and into the 1990s. Much of this effort was done via Wingspan Ministries, a Christian ministry for and with gays and lesbians within a mainline church and “normally functioning congregation.” Treadway cofounded Wingspan in 1982 with Paul Tidemann, a heterosexual pastor at St. Paul Reformation Lutheran Church, and was also active in such organizations as Lutherans Concerned, the Minnesota Committee for Gay Rights, and the Lesbian and Gay Interfaith Council. Moreover, he was on three state gay and lesbian task forces arranged by Minnesota governors in the 1980s and 1990s and was a sexual health consultant at the University of Minnesota beginning in the late 1970s.
For Treadway and the Christian clergy, lay leaders, and Christians in Minnesota who were active in their support for gay rights and liberation, the oppression experienced by homosexuals signaled an absence of human wholeness and freedom. This oppression included discrimination in employment and housing; physical and verbal abuse; messages of immorality and abnormality; loss of friends and family; the avoidance or hiding of same-sex romantic relationships; and remaining closeted or struggling to fully accept oneself as gay. For homosexuals, the oppression often resulted in anxiety, fear, shame, a diminished self-worth, and a loss of productive energy, and it suggested a lack of equality, dignity, love, and mutuality in society’s relatedness to one another as it pertained to homosexuality. A 1984 pastoral needs assessment survey conducted by the Catholic Pastoral Committee on Sexual Minorities in the St. Paul Archdiocese concluded that physical assault, queer bashing, civil rights violations, and risks to psychological health were common among gay and lesbian Catholics in Minnesota. Moreover, the Committee reported that the needs of homosexuals included personal acknowledgement, acceptance of same-sex relationships on an equal basis with heterosexual persons, and a “person-oriented theology that would address their needs as relational beings” in their struggle for self-determination. The political, social, liturgical, and pastoral efforts of the Christian community in Minnesota to advance gay rights and liberation was intended to fulfill the need for wholeness, freedom, and selfhood that was God’s intent for society.
The Christian undertaking for gay rights intertwined with secular activists and organizations to further the same goals and ideals of justice, equality, liberty, and human rights. Clergy and other Christians often coupled the freedom found in the gospel with American freedom and argued that a healthy democracy depended on inclusion, human dignity, and a society of equals. Consequently, this study of Christian support for gay rights and liberation blurs the distinction between the liberal Christian tradition and a liberal American political tradition predicated on freedom, democracy, equality, and the preservation of individual rights and liberties. Thus, in addition to presenting Christianity in this period as a liberalizing rather than repressive force and establishing that conservative Christians were not the sole religious political actors in the long 1980s, this essay indicates that the principles of a liberal Christian nation and secular liberal nation were reinforcing.
The movement was not without tension and contradiction, and the vision of human wholeness and personal freedom was not completely fulfilled, as issues pertaining to homosexuality persisted beyond the early 1990s. Nonetheless, liberal Christians pivoted the debate towards love, dignity, and freedom, and helped secure political, social, and personal gains for gays and lesbians. In the aftermath of the gay rights repeal in Dade County in 1977, there was an escalation of activity by conservatives to inhibit gay rights, including in Minnesota. The Minnesota state legislature attempted but failed in 1977 to add gay rights protections to its Human Rights Act, and a petition in St. Paul to hold a referendum overturning the city’s gay rights ordinance was successfully submitted—a referendum which passed in 1978. By 1993, while not complete, gay rights progressed. Nondiscrimination protections returned to St. Paul in 1990. And in 1993, Minnesota amended its Human Rights Act to add protections for homosexuals, an addition which Lavender magazine—reflecting fifteen years after the amendment’s passage—called transformational for the LGBT community. Furthermore, Minneapolis Star Tribune columnist Doug Grow observed in 1991 that “times had changed[,]” and there was more understanding for homosexuals among the heterosexual population.
Centering a study about gay rights progress on a midwestern city and state broadens the reach of scholarship as well as popular notions of the prominent place of gay rights and liberation activity—away from New York and San Francisco. As Jennifer L. Pierce puts forth, the portrayal of midwestern locales strictly as places of gay “intolerance, fear and repression” and the coasts as sources of gay salvation appeals only to stereotype. Minnesota has a gay rights and liberation history that stretches back to the turn of the twentieth century and included activity that was both a part of and apart from happenings on the coasts. It was the site of many post-1960s firsts or near-firsts in the United States regarding gay rights. In 1969, one month before Stonewall, the gay student group Fight Repression of Erotic Expression (FREE) was founded at the University of Minnesota, the second of its kind after a similar group was founded at Columbia University in New York City. Jack Baker, who was elected president of FREE and was openly gay, was elected president of the University of Minnesota student association in 1971. And in 1974, Minnesota state representative Allen Spear became the first openly gay male state legislator in the United States after first being elected in 1972 (and was subsequently reelected multiple times).
Minnesota and the Twin Cities were mostly Christian religiously and leaned left politically. While Christianity was the focal religious presence in the state, no one church or denomination controlled the state culturally or politically. Mainline Protestantism—specifically Lutheranism—and the Catholic Church had the largest presence, with the Catholic Church especially substantial in St. Paul. Politically, Minnesota tended towards the New Deal liberalism of the Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party, though St. Paul also had a strain of blue-collar conservatism, and it was not unusual for center-right Republicans to win state-wide office. A study of the Christian actors in Minnesota from the late 1970s to the early 1990s continues a midwestern gay rights history that may have at times paralleled peers to the east and west, but also acted in its own right.
The interpretation presented herein complicates the instinctive religious opposition/secular support dichotomy to gay rights activity that pervades scholarly literature and popular conceptions. This is a standard strand within a broader historiography that often interprets this era as one of conservative ascendance and liberal declension. The critical energy from Christian churches, leaders, and persons of faith in cultivating gay rights and a positive understanding of homosexuality in this period is not absent in the literature, but it is sparse, and the histories that disclose these dimensions often lack depth in this area. Scholars such as John D’Emilio, Heather R. White, and Mark Oppenheimer show that liberal mainline clergy have been active in their support for homosexuals, but much of their research concentrates on the period before the late 1970s and the rise of the religious right. White further explains that after Stonewall, New York-based gay liberation groups “had a well-earned reputation for avowed secularism.” Brett Krutzsch connects religion to gay rights support, but focuses on secular gay rights activists and their use of Protestant Christian ideas to garner social acceptance for gays and lesbians. Affirming this secular association with the promotion of gay rights, Tina Fetner argues that Anita Bryant and her success in Dade County not only galvanized Christian conservatives but also spurred more activism amongst secular pro-gay rights activists. A shift in scholarly attention toward religion as something other than “a repressive and singular entity” is materializing, however, as demonstrated by the scholars within Gillian Frank, Bethany Moreton, and Heather R. White’s 2018 collection of essays on religion and sexuality, including Lynne Gerber’s study of the gay-affirming Metropolitan Community Church of San Francisco in the 1980s.
This article does not reject the secular role in advancing gay rights or the experiences of gays and lesbians who found liberation by leaving the church. Nor does it refute the prevalent opposition to gay rights and homosexuality that came from Christian churches, leaders, and ordinary Americans within both fundamentalist and mainline churches. Instead, it suggests a scholarship suffused with narratives of Christian repression and secular-based liberalization engender an insufficient illustration of the influence of faith and its intersection with politics, sexuality, and gay rights in the post-1960s United States, as it marginalizes the religious beliefs of supportive clergy, churches, and persons of faith, and undermines their political, cultural, and social impact given that gay rights and liberation made gains by the early 1990s despite Christian Right resistance.
As Christianity continues to influence LGBTQ issues such as same-sex marriage, a private business’s right to refuse service to homosexuals, and gender-neutral bathroom laws in the 2010s, an examination of the liberal Christian community in Minnesota from 1977 to 1993 presents a different Christian witness to society and shows that gay rights progress has been more than just a secular undertaking. By promulgating hallmarks of their faith, such as justice, equality, freedom, and love; drawing on scripture to inform their view and argue their position; and acting as they believed Christ would act; the Christian community helped liberalize issues pertaining to homosexuality: they secured civil protections for gays and lesbians; provided spaces of affirmation and comfort; and ministered to gays and lesbians with AIDS. They did what they thought was good, working towards justice and loving kindness in order to advance human wholeness and freedom. They did, in short, what their Lord required.
Political Activity
The Christ-centered goals of human wholeness and freedom moved liberal clergy, lay leaders, and churches to undertake political activity to encourage governments to secure individual rights and liberties for homosexuals. An authentic selfhood would be advanced not only by alleviating oppression in law but by actualizing a more affirming and hospitable climate. This section traces the political activity of the liberal Christian community in support of gay rights from the late 1970s to the early 1990s. It centers on the 1978 gay rights ordinance repeal in St. Paul; the 1983 push to secure state human rights protections and anti-violence and consenting adults (anti-sodomy) legislation; the efforts from 1988 to 1991 to enact another gay rights ordinance in St. Paul after the 1978 repeal; and the successful effort in 1993 to add protections for gays and lesbians to the state’s Human Rights Act. Additionally, this section examines tensions and contradictions within the liberal Christian community.
From the early twentieth century to the 1970s, religious-based political activity largely manifested from liberal mainline churches who sought to apply their faith to life on earth. As D’Emilio, White, and Oppenheimer showed, this included occasional pro-gay rights activity. Fundamentalist or evangelical ministers—believing a person’s focus should be on personal salvation and life in the hereafter—were removed from politics and urged their congregants to be detached as well. Liberal mainline as well as Catholic social justice activity heightened in the 1960s on issues such as black civil rights, poverty, and Vietnam War protestations. While Catholic social justice activity can be traced to Pope Leo XIII’s Rerum Novarum in 1893, the Second Vatican Council in the mid-1960s further emphasized the Church’s healing and justice role as a witness to God’s love. Mainline church membership began to recede in the early 1970s in part as a backlash to the social justice activism, however, and this moved liberal churches to temper such activity, while conservative church membership grew and the country as a whole proceeded in a conservative direction.
Evangelical and conservative Catholic political involvement materialized in the mid-1970s and soon swelled, as evidenced in Anita Bryant’s anti-gay rights effort in 1977. In Minnesota, the state’s failed attempt to pass state-wide nondiscrimination protections for gays and lesbians in 1977 displayed the growing political activity and cultural influence of the religious right. The legislation was driven by Democratic State Senator Allan Spear, the nation’s first openly gay male state legislator. Spear believed he was close to advancing the bill out of the Senate, but ultimately it did not have the necessary votes. Spear and other proponents of the bill blamed its failure on fundamentalist Christian and Catholic groups. Weeks before the May vote, the Catholic bishops in Minnesota, including the archbishop of Minneapolis and St. Paul, John Roach, lobbied against the bill.
Yet the political activity from conservative Christians in 1977 and into the 1990s did not define the religious influence on the gay rights movement. After the successful repeal of gay rights in Dade County, a petition drive in St. Paul commenced to repeal its gay rights ordinance. Evangelical pastor Richard A. Angwin led an effort that included canvassing churches and collecting petition signatures from parishioners. While not as organized on a national level as conservative Christians, nor always successful, the mainline Christian community in Minnesota mobilized to maintain the civil protections in St. Paul and blunt the fundamentalist push. In an August 1977 open letter to congregations in the United Methodist Churches in Minnesota, Bishop Wayne K. Clymer observed that “a storm is brewing,” and there are people using religion to “stoke” fear and anxiety and implement sanctions. “I urge United Methodist people not to get caught up in this spirit which is alien to the love of God,” he wrote.
The St. Paul ballot question on repealing the gay rights ordinance was approved by the city council in February 1978, and the campaign began. The campaign organization opposing the repeal, St. Paul Citizens for Human Rights, was secular-based but collaborated with the religious community for support. In tandem with the Minnesota Committee for Gay Rights, St. Paul Citizens for Human Rights worked to gain religious endorsements, educated church members on homosexuality, convinced clergy to lobby their congregations, developed mailings targeted to clergy and the laity, and persuaded religious leaders to make public statements and write letters to council members. Corralling considerable religious support was the work of Reverend Dale Anderson, a minister at Pilgrim Baptist Church and cochair of St. Paul Citizens for Human Rights, and Leo Treadway of the Minnesota Committee for Gay Rights. For the 1978 effort, St. Paul Citizens for Human Rights received eighty St. Paul clergy endorsements, convinced fifteen religious organizations and congregations to take public stands, and influenced one hundred congregations to engage in study and support of the issue. In a St. Paul Citizens for Human Rights campaign brochure entitled “Religious Support of Human Rights in St. Paul,” Reverend Anderson wrote, “Ministry begins where the needs of people exists. For gay and lesbian people this is the protection of their basic rights as citizens.” Inside the brochure, more than seventy ministers, rabbis, priests, and other religious figures are listed in support of gay rights.
Bishops from the American Lutheran Church, the Lutheran Church in America, the Episcopalian Church, the United Methodist Church, and the United Church of Christ sent letters to congregations relaying their support for the gay rights ordinance. Furthermore, Catholic Archbishop John Roach, who did not favor the gay rights amendment to the Minnesota Human Rights Act in 1977, backed the gay rights position in St. Paul in 1978. While he insisted homosexuality was still a sin, he released a statement asserting that “The Catholic community recognizes and affirms the human dignity and worth of homosexuals as persons, and accordingly calls for the protection of their basic human rights,” implying that a repeal of legal protections diminished their dignity and worth. He continued: “Social isolation, ridicule and economic deprivation of homosexual behavior is not compatible with basic social justice.” Additionally, St. Paul residents beyond churchgoers would have been aware of this religious support. St. Paul Citizens for Human Rights used quotations from religious leaders in campaign materials and advertisements in newspapers. One particular large-font headline in a full-page advertisement in the Sunday St. Paul Pioneer Press on April 23, 1978—two days before the vote—read, “Christian and Jewish leaders support human rights. Here’s Why.” Quotations from nine religious leaders are then published and seventy more leaders are listed as opposing the repeal and supporting gay rights.
Roach’s statement and the correspondence of liberal mainline groups and leaders reveal the reasons persons of faith were compelled to support civil protections for gays. Seeking to restore wholeness and freedom, these arguments testified to the faith-rooted themes of justice, love, and mutuality. Pastor John H. Kemp of St. Anthony Park United Church of Christ advised his congregants to “put on love” in their relations with others to find wholeness in their lives. “The Judaic-Christian ethic calls for justice for all people, not just those with whom we happen to agree,” announced Rev. Arvid Dixen of Edina Community Lutheran Church.” “Gay people are human beings,” he further stressed. Robert W. Thatcher, in a letter to his fellow ministers, Baptists, and citizens, asserted that “like all persons, homosexual persons have a right to human respect, stable friendships, economic security, and social equality.” The Macalester-Plymouth United Church passed a resolution opposing the repeal, and its pastor, Rex Knowles, insisted ministers have a responsibility to “speak out on this issue and have the church polity support it.” And for the eighty students, faculty, and administrators of Luther-Northwestern Theological Seminaries, supporting gay and lesbian civil rights meant doing justice, loving kindness, and walking humbly with their God, as Micah instructed. In their opposition to the repeal of gay rights in St. Paul, they explained that the Bible consistently appeals for the protection of the rights of others. “If we are in error [on gay rights]”, they said, “we prefer to err on the side of compassion.”
The advancement of civil protections for gays and lesbians meant advancing a free and effective democratic society that was in alignment with both liberal Christian and American conventions. The Board of Deacons of St. Luke Lutheran Church adopted a resolution opposing the gay rights ordinance repeal. They premised their resolution on the following clauses: that “the gospel is a message of freedom for all persons,” and “the Constitution of the United States is based on freedom for all persons, even those with whom we disagree.” In their support for the gay rights ordinance, the Associated Unitarian Universalist Ministers of Minnesota affirmed “the democratic principle of equal rights for all persons” and held that “such discrimination is unconstitutional, immoral, and destructive of inherent human rights and dignity. For Rev. Francis X. Pirazzini of the United Church of Christ, there was either “justice for all or there is justice for none,” and “the preservation of democracy demands the defense of the basic human rights of all persons. Finally, Archbishop Roach, in his support for gay rights, noted that both the Christian tradition and American tradition are committed to the human dignity of each person.
In the end, the gay rights ordinance in St. Paul, like the one in Dade County, was repealed. While the vote was lost, a letter three days after the vote to Treadway from Edina Community Church parishioner Mavis Lund shows the attempts by Treadway and other persons of faith to nurture a positive Christian understanding of homosexuality made gains. Lund writes, “Thank you for what I have learned from you—about the Bible, about Christianity, about love. And I want you to know that there are people in the Church who are not bigots and who do try to live out the Gospel in their own lives as faithfully as they can. Don’t give up on us!” Writing in 1986, Treadway called the 1977–1978 gay rights contests a turning point for movement leaders and their relationship with the religious community, given the amount of mainline religious support.
In the aftermath of the 1978 St. Paul repeal, however, gays and lesbians, while continuing to become more visible and assertive, were also the target of more violence and harassment. On June 6, 1979, thirty-four-year-old gay man Terry Knudsen was fatally beaten on the head with a blunt instrument while walking through Loring Park in Minneapolis—a noted “gay hangout.” Additionally, from 1979 to 1983, there were numerous police raids in Minneapolis on gay bathhouses and bookstores resulting in hundreds of arrests. Violence by police was a problem as well. In July 1982, four Minneapolis police officers beat gay men John Hanson and Rick Hunter, with witnesses saying the officers called Hanson and Hunter “faggots.”
The Christian community was there to support gays and lesbians within this unsafe social context. In June 1979, the Priests’ Senate of the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of St. Paul and Minneapolis passed a resolution denouncing the violence. “We implore all men and women to respect the rights, dignity, and worth of every person, regardless of sexual orientation,” they said. Throughout the 1980s, liberal churches and persons of faith encouraged the state legislature to take up laws mitigating these hostile conditions and creating a safer society. Three gay rights bills were considered in the legislature in 1983: a consenting adults bill that would repeal Minnesota’s sodomy, adultery, and fornication laws; an anti-violence measure that moved to increase penalties on violence or harassment against persons because of their sexual preference (as well as race, sex, or disability); and an amendment to Minnesota’s Human Rights Act protecting gays and lesbians from discrimination in housing, employment, civil service, and public accommodations. Lobby ’83 was the campaign group pushing for the passage of these bills, but churches and religious groups were instrumental in ensuring the legislation was taken up. The Minnesota Committee for Gay and Lesbian Rights and Wingspan led the mobilization effort. They worked with Christian gay groups such as Lutherans Concerned, Dignity Twin Cities, and Integrity Twin Cities to garner support from clergy and laity.
The political activity from the religious community in support of these bills was evident. It included making public endorsements, testifying to government committees, encouraging congregational support, and writing legislators. Bishop Harold R. Lohr, in a letter to other bishops, spoke in favor of the gay rights legislation because “we are talking about justice and freedom, not about approval or disapproval of a lifestyle.” In a campaign brochure, the secular Lobby ’83 made clear these pro-gay bills had religious support, publicizing several church endorsements accompanied with quotations from the religious community. For example, the United Church of Christ declared, “Christian love for God and our neighbor impels us to cherish the life and liberty of all women and men.” The Lutheran Church in America maintained that “It is essential to see such persons as entitled to justice and understanding in church and community.” And in a Gathering Post editorial, Christian and gay rights activist Jim Chalgren proclaimed that Christianity was about love and that Jesus taught us to love our neighbor.
Political activity by liberal leaders and churches was evident in other ways. Clergy wrote letters to legislators, articulating these same themes. Arley K. Fadness, the pastor at Messiah Lutheran Church in Mankato, wrote, “I call upon the legislators to deal with justice upon those who persecute or harass in any way these people cared for and loved by God.” Ordinary heterosexual Christians made their support known as well. In a May 6, 1983 letter to the St. Paul Dispatch, Minneapolis resident Buck Hanson said, “We should practice more genuine Christian love and compassion towards gays and lesbians … Let’s give these people the same right to our quality of life as heterosexuals.” Finally, at the Lutheran Church in America Minnesota Synod convention in June 1983, the eight hundred forty-two delegates and pastors, reacting to repeated attempts by conservative congregations to pass a draft statement condemning homosexuality, instead passed a resolution in support of gay rights while criticizing conservatives for going against scripture.
All three bills failed in 1983. The push from Wingspan and the rest of the religious community to enact similar legislation continued for the rest of the 1980s, again without success.
Further, the 1978 St. Paul gay rights ordinance effort and the legislative push in the early 1980s exposed tensions and contradictions within the liberal mainline community. Many clergy who were supportive of civil protections worried that being open about such a position would lead to reduced church donations, congregational support, and church membership—which was already on the decline for many mainline faiths.
The sharpest point of tension was over the issue of homosexuality itself. Some church bodies and clergy that publicly expressed support for civil protections for gay and lesbians qualified their support by stating that homosexuality was still immoral and they did not endorse the homosexual “lifestyle.” As a church “we reject the practice of homosexuality,” said Bishop Herbert W. Chilstrom of the Lutheran Church in America in his statement of support for gay rights in St. Paul in 1978. The United Methodist Church bishop Wayne Clymer took the same position: “The practice of homosexuality is rejected as normative sexual relations.”
A 1982 statement in support of gay rights by the Minnesota Council of Churches—made up of eighteen member organizations and representing about 45% of the state’s religious population—illustrates this church tension. The statement, which Leo Treadway and Paul Tidemann helped craft, was released in October 1982 and explained the Christian foundations of the Council’s gay rights support: life is created by God and is good; human beings are divinely loved without distinction; God created human beings for relationship; it is in shared, intimate and empowering relationships that people find that which is life-giving; and God’s intended wholeness includes human sexuality as a gift for the expression of love and the generation of life. But controversy ensued. Forty-five pastors and seventeen congregations released an advertisement in the major Twin Cities newspapers objecting to the resolution, which was nonbinding to member organizations. They were concerned the statement promoted homosexual practices. Troubled by the apparent suggestion that the homosexual lifestyle was acceptable, Harvey R. Senecal of the Presbytery of Minnesota Valleys observed that “a real firestorm is brewing against the Minnesota Council of Churches … When our Session gets upset, that is a real warning flag.” Bishop Elmo Agrimson of the Southeastern Minnesota District of the American Lutheran Church said the statement could result in the loss of up to $60,000 worth of donations to his church. While he endorsed civil protections for gays, he believed the statement was administered poorly and did not involve enough clergy. He called for a longer and more inclusive process. To this suggestion, Treadway replied that it would not have helped. “I want to point out that for a long time in this country, gay and lesbian people have been discardable people, discardable even to the church … We ought to remember the cost to gay and lesbian people, which they have borne for a long time.”
Lay faithful also expressed their displeasure with the Council statement. In a letter to Executive Director Reverend Willis J. Merriman, William R. Lundquist of Minneapolis held that while he accepts the homosexual as an individual, “his or her actions should not be condoned by the church.” This will cause “deterioration in my church and cause members to seek a new church home. Mrs. Wm. R. South of Minneapolis claimed the statement was contrary to the word of God. John and Ann Cina of Emmaus Lutheran Church in suburban Richfield, Minnesota were upset the statement implied homosexuals were “a normal group in our society.”
The Council also received a number of letters in support. These letters conveyed the Christian themes of love, inclusivity, and being Christ-like. Barbara Lee of St. Paul appreciated that there were churches and clergy acting on the message of Christ: “Love and promises for ALL.” Mary V. Borhek of St. Paul was proud to be a part of a church that was affiliated with a council “that is living a pattern of true Christian caring.” And in a letter to Joy Bussert, associate director of the Council, eighty-three-year-old Elsa Johnson explained her thoughts regarding homosexuals and the church:
I read in the paper there seems to be a problem in other churches with homosexual people. Well let me tell you, there are lots of gay men and lesbian women at my church and they are wonderful … My husband and I are grateful for the witness they share. There should be more regular Christians who are as devoted to God in the Church! It’s about time all people are welcomed and accepted in the churches. Continue the good work and please don’t back off now!
A postscript noted this was the first time she had written a letter “like this.”
The tension within the mainline community and the qualified support for gay civil rights amongst some clergy and churches raised the question as to what extent one could support civil protections for gays premised on the Christian calling for love, justice, freedom, and dignity yet oppose homosexuality itself. Could a gay person still be whole and free if their sexuality continued to be condemned as immoral and sinful? The clergy who qualified their support conflicted with faith leaders who not only supported civil protections but also put forth that homosexuality was good in-and-of-itself. What God created was good, they declared, and to see the full human dignity and equality in each person meant equating homosexuality with heterosexuality. They believed consensual sex between same-sex partners—like that of opposite-sex partners—was a manifestation of God’s love and moved a person towards human wholeness with the ability to enjoy all that was “life-giving.”
Despite these tensions and contradictions, and notwithstanding the conservative climate of the 1980s, the Christian movement for gay rights continued with few concrete legislative gains. In October 1986, the Wesley United Methodist Church expressed the typical sentiment from the supportive religious community and adopted a statement that read:
We who make up Wesley United Methodist Church, being convinced of the Biblical call to love and justice for all persons, proclaim our commitment to a ministry of Jesus Christ for and with all persons regardless of race, gender, age, economic status, or sexual orientation. For the church to fail at love is then to fail at our central purpose.
Furthermore, the fusion of Christian and American ideals continued to be seen in these gay rights efforts in the 1980s. In a letter to Lutheran pastors asking for support of the human rights, anti-violence, and consenting adults legislation in 1983, Treadway contended that “Liberation is very much a part of our shared heritage, both as Americans and as Christians.” He then cited a recent Sunday gospel reading from Luke 4:19, “The Spirit of the Lord … has sent me to proclaim release to the captives … and to set at liberty those who are oppressed.” He concluded by explaining the need to translate that call into “effective action.” And during a 1984 gay rights ordinance battle in Duluth, Minnesota, the prayer for the day at First Unitarian Church, a gay-welcoming church, connected freedom with love and wholeness:
Help us today by your love and grace to be the messengers of your liberation. Guide us to a greater commitment amongst your people to work for the freedom and justice of all people everywhere … We believe that the being of God moves always towards relationships and that God creates human beings for relationship, with self, with others, and with God, the ground of being. As brokenness and separation occur in these relationships, we are called to announce God’s intention to restore persons to wholeness.
Beginning in 1988, gay rights advocates in St. Paul pressed for a new city ordinance after the 1978 repeal. The city council passed an ordinance in 1990 banning discrimination against gays in the areas of employment, housing, education, and public services. In 1991, however, anti-gay rights activists secured a ballot referendum in an attempt to repeal that ordinance. Unlike 1978, however, this referendum went down to defeat, and gay rights in St. Paul stuck.
There was considerable religious support and organizing for these measures. Led by Episcopal Bishop Robert M. Anderson, Wingspan convened a working group that had local Christian leaders in charge of gathering religious support within each of St. Paul’s seven ward districts. The group gained endorsements from pastors, worked to get out the vote, disseminated information to clergy and church congregations, and pressed clergy to lobby their congregations to support gay rights. Inserts for liturgical bulletins were created that included information on discrimination against gays and lesbians, church statements on gay rights, and reasons why church members should vote. Other educational resources were produced as well, with an intent to combat what they saw as misinformation and fear being presented from the anti-gay rights groups. Further religious support came from Catholic Archbishop John Roach and the Catholic Commission on Social Justice. They distributed forty letters to St. Paul parishes in 1988 assuaging “unfounded” fears about homosexuals and communicating their support for the “human rights amendment.” Additionally, Tidemann wrote letters to fellow pastors encouraging support, and sought gays and lesbians to testify to the city council about the discrimination they encountered.
Religious activity also manifested from the nominally secular campaign organizations YES for Human Rights (in 1988) and Campaign ’90s (from 1989 to 1991). These organizations collaborated with religious leaders and groups, identifying fifty-two congregations in St. Paul that were supportive. They used endorsements from religious leaders in campaign literature and newspaper advertisements. Public statements revealed these leaders’ religious understandings. “We speak from religious traditions which recognize and affirm the human dignity of all persons created in the image of God,” read one piece of campaign literature. Government action was needed to protect this dignity, they said. Furthermore, the campaign canvassed church congregations to raise awareness of the issue and encourage political support. The effort in St. Paul worked, beating back the repeal in 1991.
In 1993, the Minnesota state legislature passed an amendment to its state Human Rights Act that provided nondiscrimination protection for gays and lesbians in employment, housing, and public accommodation. Christian support helped advance this protection of individual rights and liberties. “By virtue of being created in the image of God, all persons have dignity,” said Brian Rusche, executive director of the Joint Religious Leadership Council in a March 18, 1993 guest editorial to the St. Paul Pioneer Press. Asserting that the violence and discrimination towards gays and lesbians in Minnesota compromised their dignity, he continued: “Civil authority exists to protect the dignity of all persons and the claim each of us has to basic human rights.” Christian support presented itself elsewhere. In one piece of campaign literature, the pro-gay rights campaign group It’s Time Minnesota listed twenty-five religious organizations and churches endorsing the act. In a letter to members of Minnesota’s faith community appealing for support, they referenced the prophet Isaiah, saying God required people to “see that justice is done” and “help people that are oppressed.” Finally, in a cosigned letter, six Minnesota bishops from the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America wrote to members of the Minnesota House of Representatives suggesting passage of the bill. They claimed it would affirm human rights for all human beings.
The grassroots political activity from the liberal Christian community in Minnesota from 1977 to 1993 suggests that the role of religion in support of gay rights has been underplayed in the conventional historical narratives. In line with a liberal Christian tradition that sought to do God’s work here on earth and ensure a just society of persons whole and free, Christian clergy, lay leaders, and churches pushed through a determined conservatism to advance individual rights and liberties for gays and lesbians in Minnesota while also hoping these protections would further a hospitable climate. This progress on gay rights is even more noteworthy given the enhanced antipathy towards homosexuals from conservative Christians with the onset of the AIDS crisis in the early 1980s.
AIDS
Already struggling to gain acceptance in society, the AIDS epidemic in the 1980s was a setback for homosexuals, as the majority of early cases involved gay men. Religious conservatives contributed to the deeper societal marginalization of gays and lesbians with their reaction of fear and condemnation, proclaiming that AIDS was the work of God as punishment for the sin of homosexuality. They also used the AIDS crisis to further their cause. As historian Anthony M. Petro explains, “The AIDS epidemic offered leaders of the Christian Right a new site to elaborate their political positions, as the appearance of a virus afflicting mostly gay men provided the proof needed to trumpet the moral superiority of ‘traditional values’ and to warn Americans to scale back the freedoms granted through the ‘sexual revolution.'” Additionally, the federal government was slow to combat the disease because of its association with homosexuality, putting little money into public health or education measures. For persons with AIDS, at stake was living a life of human dignity and finding a modicum of comfort in their last days.
While the federal government, conservative Christians, and portions of ordinary society neglected their fellow Americans with AIDS—especially homosexuals—the liberal Christian community in Minnesota combatted this dereliction. Churches and clergy provided pastoral care, ministered to AIDS patients, counseled them and their family members, educated the public about AIDS and homosexuality, and coordinated medical and social services and funeral arrangements. In addition, they cultivated a sympathetic understanding of both AIDS and homosexuality to a society where significant gaps existed. AIDS patients were targets of prejudice, discrimination, and fear. They were less than whole, and less than free. The Christian community intended to restore this wholeness and be a witness to Christ’s love and mutuality in how persons relate to others. The General Board of Global Ministries of the United Methodist Church maintained that “Christ’s healing was not peripheral but central to his ministry […] Taking the gospel mandates seriously, United Methodists are called to work toward a healthy society of whole persons.” The ELCA Church Council in 1988 declared that “The undeserved love of God announced for all in the Gospel of Jesus Christ is our reason for standing with our neighbor in need. Jesus responded graciously to persons who were sick without assessing their merit.” Dr. James B. Nelson, a professor of Christian Ethics at United Theological Seminary of the Twin Cities, echoed this sentiment. He used the story of Jesus and the blind man in John 9 to suggest how society should respond to persons with AIDS. “The disciples asked, ‘Who sinned, he or his parents?’ Jesus answers, ‘neither.’ ‘But it is so that the works of God might be revealed in him.'” Jesus then assists in the blind man’s healing. And for Robert H. Cilke, pastor of Brookdale Christian Assembly of God Church in Brooklyn Center, Minnesota, helping persons with AIDS was also about doing the work of Christ. Writing in Twin Cities Christian on March 26, 1987 and asking the question, “How must we treat AIDS victims?,” he said it did not matter how the person contracted the disease. “We have an obligation to show Christ’s compassion to a hurting, helpless, hopeless world. We must be the hands of Jesus—to bear up those who are wounded.” He then gives the example from Luke of Jesus touching the lepers.
Prayer services and vigils were one avenue towards comfort, strength, and human fulfillment for gays and lesbians (and others) with AIDS. They furthered emotional and spiritual healing and demonstrated community support. AIDS required a compassionate response by the church, the AIDS Interfaith Council of Minnesota pronounced. Three examples establish this compassionate response. Episcopal Cathedral Church of St. Mark held a prayer service on December 28, 1985. About the event, Fr. Leo Tibesar professed, “A message is…being sent by the service to the community at-large that the most appropriate response to people facing death at any age or for any reason is one of compassion, not judgment, and prayer, not platitudes … People who believe in a merciful God can do no less.” Temple Israel hosted the AIDS Interfaith Benefit Prayer Service on January 7, 1989. A Minneapolis Star Tribune editorial notifying the public about the event referenced the discrimination, suffering, and “cold shoulder” many with AIDS had encountered, and how this prayer service was meant to “contradict cruel messages and replace silence with graceful speech.” Lastly, All God’s Children Metropolitan Community Church held a “50 Hour Vigil of Prayer” from October 2 to 4, 1987. The church was available for fifty consecutive hours for people to engage in private prayer or meditation, receive counseling, or attend educational seminars.
In addition to hosting prayer services, churches and pastors ministered to the sick and counseled family members struggling to cope not just with their loved one’s sexuality, but likely death. The Catholic Archdiocese of St. Paul and Minneapolis organized an AIDS ministry program where they educated the public, held support groups for those with AIDS and their friends and family, provided funeral and memorial services, and coordinated with public health officials. Said Archbishop Roach, “Regardless of how the illness originated, we must show compassion, care, and concern for the individuals and families so devastatingly affected by AIDS.” As an example of their reach, 289 persons with AIDS or HIV requested pastoral ministry through this program from September 1, 1988 to September 1, 1989; and seven hundred thirty friends or family members requested some sort of pastoral support. Fridley United Methodist Church provided further knowledge about AIDS. They hosted a conference on the disease entitled “Education Against Fear” on March 28, 1987 and held an interfaith workshop on the ministerial dimensions of AIDS in May 1987. Additionally, Lutheran Social Services of Minnesota put on an AIDS seminar for pastors and lay persons on February 25, 1989.
Along with pastoral care and prayer services, the Christian churches and organizations ensured other services for persons with AIDS. St. Joan of Arc Church in Minneapolis opened its “Grace House” in 1990 as a place for people with AIDS to live in safety, comfort, and dignity while they were dying. Moreover, the AIDS Interfaith Council of Minnesota provided lists of churches welcoming of persons with AIDS and pastors willing to conduct funerals and memorials services; and they furnished nursing homes with names of persons who could educate practitioners on caring for persons with AIDS.
Faith was also a source of internal strength and emotional comfort for gay persons with AIDS. The Archdiocesan AIDS Ministry Program compiled handwritten remarks from gay men with AIDS in the late 1980s. These remarks reveal a positive elucidation of a religion that many on the right had used to condemn them. One gay man with AIDS proclaimed, “My conception of God tells me, ‘keep your faith strong in me and your hand reaching for my hand.’ I will not allow anyone in my last day to scare me with their misconceptions, judgments and stigmas.” “AIDS has … given me a loving relationship with my Lord,” said another gay man. Fifty-four-year-old George R. Kish reflected on his many blessings from God, including “the Lord’s beautiful gift to me of my gay sexuality.” He closed in exclamation: “Thanks dear Lord, for making my life with AIDS worth living!” The pastoral care, church services, and words of gay men with AIDS further attest to the role of Christianity in supporting gays and lesbians in the later twentieth century.
Self-Affirmation and Social Comfort
The expressions of these men with AIDS complement the final way Christianity was a liberalizing force on issues pertaining to homosexuality: as a source of self-affirmation and social comfort. This comfort and affirmation promoted a liberating authentic selfhood for homosexuals. While openness amongst homosexuals and understanding from heterosexuals grew as time went on, a significant segment of society was unaccepting of gay and lesbian persons. Moreover, many homosexuals found it difficult to accept themselves as gay. What it meant to be homosexual had been shaped by a heterosexual-dominant society rather than by gay men and lesbian women themselves. “[Gays and lesbians] have been so ill-equipped to shape their own identities, or to understand themselves,” explain Dudley Clendinen and Adam Nagourney in their history of the gay rights movement. “They had … no positive way to see themselves.”
While Christianity and the church were a source of this oppression for gays and lesbians, they were also spaces of liberation and affirmation. Affirming others signaled a loving mutuality in relationships—as was God’s intent. Faith and scripture enabled a recognition of homosexuality as good because it was God-given. Furthermore, churches and religious groups were places for gays and lesbians to be open about their sexuality, whether they were amongst homosexuals or heterosexuals. They provided fellowship, acceptance, and emotional safety—without judgment in the midst of internal and external struggles.
Treadway’s sermon and Bible study notes elucidate the role of Christianity as a source of affirmation. Treadway encouraged these men and women to look for their story in God’s story. The gay experience, he noted in 1975, is often explained in secular terms yet refuted theologically. But as God’s creations, “our experience is good and beautiful,” and the process of coming out can be seen as “allowing access for yourself to the light of God’s understanding of yourself.” The argument for civil rights for gays, he suggested, comes via God’s intent for human relationships as equal and not treating others as less than.” In a letter to members of his Wingspan ministry, he further used religion to uplift the gay community and arrive at a positive understanding of their gay identity. “Love is from God,” he proclaimed. “Do not forget this, do not let others distort the truth.”
Treadway also led Bible studies to cultivate strength and affirmation amongst gays and lesbians. In these sessions, he connected Scripture to their lives. In one such session in May 1988, Treadway asked a series of questions, then used biblical passages to inform an answer: “Are gay/lesbian people also a part of the people of God?,” he asked. A reading of Phillip and the Ethiopian Eunich in Acts 8:26–40 revealed the answer was “yes.” John 9:1–11 shows that lesbians and gay men are a valuable part of God’s people. Should gays and lesbians change who they are? In I Corinthians 7:17, God says to “live as God calls you.” Finally, “What does God require?” Treadway asked. For that, he referenced Micah 6:8—to do justice, love kindness, and walk humbly with God.
Bemidji State University student Michael Elliot provides another example of the affirming and liberating role of faith for gays and lesbians. In a 1987 article in the school newspaper Northern Student for its series on homosexuality and homophobia, Elliot explained that religion has helped gays find meaning in their lives. “Homosexuals are finding life and hope in the Bible and in their religious expression.” Some letters to the editor criticized Elliot’s interpretation of his faith. One such letter was from Derwin Johnson, who referenced Leviticus 18:22—the oft-cited Biblical passage by conservative Christians demonstrating the sin of homosexuality—and declared, “That’s the Bible.” In a letter two weeks later, Elliot responded to the criticism. “I am gay and Christian,” he professed. “I am confident in both.”
Churches and their worship services were also a source of wholeness and freedom. Pastor Marshall Williams of All God’s Children Metropolitan Community Church explained in 1982 that few places of community existed for homosexuals other than “bars, bathrooms, bushes, and bookstores.” These latter establishments were often targeted by police or thought of as disreputable by the mainstream public. Churches were esteemed organizations, however. For gays and lesbians, the church was not simply a place of worship but a non-threatening space to socialize with other homosexuals and a place to be open about their sexuality with heterosexuals. While in worship, churches affirmed the dignity of homosexuals and engendered hope and solidarity for gays as they strove to overcome the challenges they faced. These worship services—in both mainline churches that were welcoming of gays and churches that opened with the purpose of ministering to homosexuals—often noted the stresses gays and lesbians experienced, yet furnished inspiration through the words and actions of Christ. “Clear before us through the darkness gleams and burns the guiding light,” rang the opening hymn of a Good Friday service in 1983, which connected the plight of Jesus and his crucifixion to the experience of gays and lesbians. The benediction leader at the Good Friday service at Wesley United Methodist Church in 1984 voiced to parishioners that “Christ has said ‘I will be with you always, to the end of the age’…and may each of us be strengthened to love to serve one another, our communities, and our God…now and forever.” And Arlene Ackerman, the pastor at All God’s Children Metropolitan Community Church, told a morning worship crowd of 575 people on March 22, 1987 that the church “meets human need in the name of Christ Jesus,” and, “God loves each and every one of us just as God created us.”
The underpinnings to homosexual affirmation came from a trio of twentieth-century intellectuals: Protestant theologian Helmut Thieliche, Roman Catholic theologian Gregory Baum, and John J. McNeill, a psychotherapist, former Catholic priest, and gay man. Thieliche’s relationship theology emphasized the quality, not type of relationship. Sexuality, he said, was a gift from God, and a loving homosexual relationship was witness to God’s love. Baum submitted that the church is to affirm, rather than shame. Homosexual love, he said, is not contrary to human nature, but a sign of loving mutuality. And McNeill claimed that “love between gay people is a holy love, not a sinful love.” Homosexuality was a part of God’s intent, he said, and the goal of a healthy self-love and self-acceptance is “psychologically possible only when one can accept one’s sexuality as morally good, and, in a Christian context, compatible with God’s love.”
A liberation theology was also present. This theology, first borne out of economic oppression in Latin America in the early 1970s and premised on interpreting scripture based on one’s experience, was borrowed by gays and lesbians to find comfort, freedom, and understanding of their situation as an oppressed group. As George R. Edwards explains, gay and lesbian liberation theology sought to correlate liberation, love, and sexuality to better overcome the internalized fear and rejection so many gays and lesbians experienced. It was a theology “based on the sacrificial love of God and the shaping of human relationships, including sexual ones, according to the spirit of this love.”
The liberal Christian community affirmed gays and lesbians in the long 1980s not just by way of civil protections and political activity but also by fostering gays’ and lesbians’ acceptance of their sexuality and sense of worth as human beings. “As Christians we seek to provide a loving and accepting climate in which persons can be accepting of God’s love of themselves and can begin to see models of loving relationships in which persons give life to one another,” professed Paul Tidemann in 1987. Referencing Romans 3 and 8, he continued: “There is nothing that one is or that one does which puts a person outside of the loving grace of God.” In the later twentieth-century United States, Churches and the Christian faith were sources of comfort, freedom, human fulfillment, and authenticity for gays and lesbians in the midst of fear, antagonism, the AIDS epidemic, and civil rights struggles.
Conclusion
On April 22, 1981, religious right leader Jerry Falwell spoke at the Minneapolis Auditorium to fundraise for a college he founded, Liberty Bible College (now Liberty University), and promote his fundamentalist Christian and anti-gay rights agenda. To protest this agenda, a pro-gay rights demonstration formed outside the civic arena. Two discordant voices were on display that evening—one overtly Christian-based, the other at least nominally secular. But another group soon joined the pro-gay rights crowd. Holding a cross high in the air, Leo Treadway led a group of robe-wearing and candle-holding Christians from Loring Park in Minneapolis to join the protestors. “We looked like something out of the past,” Treadway remarked. “As we turned the corner into the view of the shouting protestors, there was a great sudden silence as everyone turned to look at us. Simultaneously, the television cameras and lights turned in our direction. Then the applause and shouting began as everyone realized who we were: Christian gays and lesbians who had come to stand with our brothers and sisters and to be a different Christian voice … and a different Christian witness to society.”
For Christianity and the church, taking up gay rights in the long 1980s revealed Christianity as a liberalizing force that sought to fill the need for wholeness, freedom, and authentic selfhood. That the initial pro-gay rights protestors in Minneapolis were taken aback by the group of Christians joining their protest is understandable considering the most apparent religious voices in the gay rights debate came from conservative Christian corners that condemned homosexuals and homosexuality. For many, the fundamentalist Christian position on homosexuality and gay rights was perceived simply as the Christian position on homosexuality and gay rights. Still today, popular and scholarly conceptions often link religiosity with gay rights opposition and secularism with personal liberation and the protection of civil liberties.
Yet the fusion between the two counter protest groups on that 1978 evening in Minneapolis was also emblematic of the post-1960s United States gay rights movement that entwined religious and secular activists and found a mutuality between the liberal Christian and liberal American political traditions. The gay rights movement in Minnesota from 1977 to 1993 thus prefigured the gay rights progress made in the 2010s. In the 2015 United States Supreme Court decision Obergefell v. Hodges, Justice Anthony Kennedy’s opinion for the majority cited the principles of equality, liberty, individual dignity, and love in finding laws against same-sex marriage to be unconstitutional. Gillian Frank, Bethany Moreton, and Heather R. White note that in the wake of this decision, the top-ranked Bible verse that was tweeted was 1 Corinthians 13:13: “But the greatest of these is love.” Three years prior to this Court decision, Minnesota voters defeated a conservative-led referendum that would have made same-sex marriage unconstitutional in the state. With supporters proclaiming the simple yet relatable campaign refrain of “love is love,” Minnesota became the first state to defeat such a referendum after thirty similar ballot measures in the United States had been successful. In their campaign plan to defeat the referendum, Minnesotans United for All Families referred to these previous failures and the role religion played. “It could be argued,” they said, “that voters’ religiosity is a fundamental reason campaigns on this issue have failed.” Instead of being resigned to the secular side of the contest, however, the campaign undertook faith-based political organizing as one part of convincing voters to defeat the referendum. The Obergefell decision and the Minnesota same-sex marriage ban defeat lifted up the tenets of love, dignity, equality, mutuality, and freedom.
While there is room for further studies of the fundamentalist Christian impact on gay and lesbian rights, a historiography centered on such influence may narrow present perceptions of Christianity and undermine the faith and agency of the large number of liberal churches and faithful at a time where religion continues to affect politics, culture, and society in the United States—including issues pertaining to sexuality. This examination of Christianity and the gay rights movement in Minnesota from 1977 to 1993 demonstrates that faith-based advocacy for gay rights has a history—that the association between religious activity and gay rights did not simply mean fundamentalist religious activity in opposition to gay rights. This was a different Christian witness to society—a society of mutuality, freedom, and wholeness, conveyed from a faith that said to love as God loved and act as Christ acted. And in being that witness, the liberal Christian community helped liberalize issues pertaining to homosexuality by advancing laws that protected individual rights and liberties, providing spaces of social comfort and affirmation, and ministering to gays and lesbians with AIDS.