Recruiting Young Love: How Christians Talk about Homosexuality

(ProQuest: ... denotes non-US-ASCII text omitted.)Caught up in the stakes of the "homosexuality debate," neither American Christians nor scholars of American religions often pause to ask how this largely Christian dispute emerged in its current terms or why it seems to center on the sexual identify formation of teenaged boys. In this fascinating volume, Mark Jordan steps beyond the bounds of the Roman Catholic tradition to explore these questions with his trademark blend of history, cultural studies, theology, ethics, and rhetorical criticism, which here takes center stage. Also characteristically, Jordan points from conversations that were to those that could be.Jordan argues that Christian talk about homosexuality has been composed of a series of erratic "fast" rhetorics built on a foundation of enduring "slow" rhetorics (211-12). Both have focused primarily on white males in their vulnerable adolescence. Jordan's starting points are psychologists G. Stanley Hall, whose Adolescence (New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1904) arguably invented the term, and Havelock Ellis, to whose work on sexuality Hall alluded elliptically, as well as novelist Forman Brown, in whose semi-autobiographical Better Angel (New York: Greenberg, 1933) the psycho-spiritual rhetoric of "homosexuality" that would typify the next seventy years of the American conversation was "already activated" by 1933 (25).On this stage Jordan artfully erects a series of roughly chronological "tableaux" (xix) that illustrate the repetition, development, and metamorphosis of this basic rhetoric. The first is composed of the Kinsey reports, which normalized same-sex sexual interaction, and pulp novels like Gore Vidal's The City and the Pillar (New York: Dutton, 1948), which provided a glimpse into gay life, wrapped in the imagery of Sodom and Gomorrah. Both performed the earlier rhetoric in a new key for a wider public, forcing religious leaders who disliked their "permissiveness" to employ their language, setting a precedent for combining the scientific idiom of psychology with those of sin, virtue, and tragedy.In the next scene, American Christian moralists and churches divide the discourse: action from person, moral judgment from legal recommendation, and individual tendency from social cause, creating a space for "the homosexual" to find an "outlet" for his desire and to live uncondemned, if tragically. Jordan also traces the mid-century rise of "homophile" groups where gay men--read as members of an oppressed race--could pursue what they were already calling their spirituality at a safe distance from Egypt. In this tableau sexual orientation becomes a matter of birth, and therefore something with which God must reckon.Jordan also notes early Quaker and Episcopalian efforts to describe homosexuality as non-pathological. Ironically, public homophobia abetted this development: urban Christian youth ministry programs pursued queer youth at the behest of "homophile" organizations which--out of public fear of "recruitment" and sexual exploitation of adolescents--were explicitly forbidden to work with them.Next on the docket are post-Christian utopian spiritual visions and gay ire at Christian homophobia, a dialectical pairing that makes room for celebrations of the created goodness of homosexuality in self-consciously Christian gay movements. Jordan notes the unintended consequences: gay liberationists replaced the idea of adolescence with the idea of "coming out" in young adulthood, leaving behind chronological adolescents. …