as small as a world and as large as alone, (you posted about this last night) Are queer...

8:48am August 29, 2014

hugintheraven asked: (you posted about this last night) Are queer spaces usually not safe for people of faith? At least in the US, I have a hard time imagining there's anywhere that /isn't/ safe for people of faith. (Speaking generally, of course. I know there's plenty of places that aren't safe for people of the wrong faith, but that wasn't what I think you were talking about)

clatterbane:

ameliarating:

(Referencing this post by kosherqueer.)

So I’m going to split this answer up into addressing two points - and keep in mind that I am speaking from my own experiences here and I don’t want anyone to assume this has been true for everyone.

Not safe for people of faith

I’ve noticed that a lot of the queer spaces in which I’ve been involved have been very strongly secular - and of course there isn’t anything wrong with that. As a member of a minority faith, I encourage it (otherwise anything religious starts to take on a majority religion feel - see next point) and I also know that a lot of the people in those spaces have been hurt and excluded because of the faith groups in which they grew up. But there are often a lot of assumptions being made that everyone in these spaces are secular or atheists and so people and that all religions and faiths are harmful to queer people and this leads to a lot of cruel and mocking comments about what religion and how religion is inherently intolerant and brainwashing and that people of faith are sheep and stupid, etc.

I actually have a friend (who may be reading this and will be left unnamed unless they tell me they want their URL here) who stopped volunteering for a local queer rights organization partly because a volunteer coordinator was so loudly anti-religion and so dismissive of anyone religious that he made them feel unwelcome. I felt unwelcome as well but because he was higher up in the organization than I was (I was just an intern), I didn’t feel comfortable speaking up past a certain point.

Overall, a lot of people would vocally blame religious people and religion for intolerance and homophobia in society and while this is certainly a problem in a lot of religious contexts, the conversation began to sound less like “there are a lot of faith groups that use religion to justify homophobia and that’s disgusting” and more like “religion is outdated and the root of all intolerance in society and we should get rid of all of it and teach the gullible religious people that they’re wrong.”

Often I felt as if people were trying to convert me from my religion and my culture which was just too religious to fit neatly into their religious/homophobe - secular/queer dichotomy.

Not safe for people of the wrong faith

As a Jew, and so as a member of a minority faith, this cropped up in three ways. One, people assumed that everything they had found wrong in mainstream Christianity applied people of all religions. If someone had been victimized by a Christian community because they were queer, they would often turn their (obviously understandable) anger and derision towards people of other religions as well. For example, while the Christian interpretation of the sin of Sodom has traditionally been gay sex (hence “sodomy”), the Jewish interpretation has traditionally been that the sin was being inhospitable to guests and strangers - but people would refer to the Christian interpretation as if all religious people held that opinion of sin.

Two, even among queer people of faith, my own religion was dismissed or minimized with Christianity being the reference point. For example, I was invited by (that same) local queer rights organization to join an outreach program managed by queer people faith targeting faith communities as allies. I was the only non-Christian there. Not only was the entire meeting overwhelmingly Christian referenced but the opening prayer was actually and literally in Jesus’ name.

Other religions weren’t represented at all and when I brought up reaching out to mosques and Muslim queers, the facilitator actually said that she didn’t think she’d find anyone to connect with in the Muslim community, the assumption being that religious Muslims were necessarily homophobic - the same sort of assumptions that many of the non-religious people in the organization held toward all people of faith.

Needless to say, I did not return to this program.

Three, prejudices like Islamophobia and anti-Semitism exist just as strongly in queer communities as they do anywhere else and left unaddressed they become poisonous. Being secular and “enlightened” and “hating all religions” does not keep people from being bigoted towards persons of minority faiths.

So you can see the predicament this left me and other queer people of faith who looked for a safe space for one aspect of themselves only to find another aspect of themselves deemed unacceptable.

TLDR:

Secular queers can get pretty nasty and unwelcoming to queer people of faith and make all sorts of assumptions about queer people of minority faiths (Jewish, Muslim, etc.) that leave safe spaces not so safe at all.

(I would also add that, as is so frequently the case in general with people coming from certain backgrounds who go aggressively secular based on their own experiences with organized religion, non-Abrahamic religious traditions may as well not exist at all. Some of these assumptions are inappropriate enough applied to Judaism or Islam, as mentioned above—but things can turn weird and insulting really fucking quickly when people try to apply them to generally non-Western religions that have literally nothing in common with authoritarian flavors of Christianity. Including when, as an afterthought often after someone mentions it, some other religions are “not REALLY religions” because nontheistic, etc. Nice. :-| It really can be a problem. By no means just in the kinds of settings discussed here, but definitely there too.)

I’ve also seen some religions literally used as the wrong end of a joke, and only as jokes, in those same aggressively secular contexts. "Well why should we believe in Jesus, any more than anyone would worship Apollo?“ Well, there’s no reason you should have to believe in Jesus, but there are plenty of Hellenistic-derived religions alive and well today that do in fact contain people who worship Apollo. And the same is true for literally any ancient god or goddess you pick out from any ancient culture, so changing which god you’re making into a joke, won’t help. What does help is avoiding making people’s pagan gods into the punchline of your anti-Christian rhetoric, and being far more honest about the fact that this is what you’re doing: Using people’s ignorance about gods that are still worshipped today, in order to make Christians look ridiculous.

And I don’t even want to know what they’d make of ‘religions’ like mine, where there’s only one human practitioner to my knowledge. There’s a reason I’ve been very reluctant to discuss my faith in public. I don’t have any form of safety in numbers. (I have run into a number of other people whose faiths are very similar to mine and who have come to them in the same strange way I have, but I’ve never run into someone of the exact same faith and I think it would be hard for that to happen.) Luckily the worst I’ve gotten so far is laughed at or considered 'crazy’, but I would not want to be in any sort of discussion or debate with staunchly anti-religion people where my faith came up, at all. It’s not meant to be up for debate or public dissection or ridicule.