The Faith Project's two-month-long film series "Queering the Faith" culminated May 11 with a townhall-style discussion at the Adler School of Psychology. A four-person panel that included Jewish, Muslim and Catholic speakers explored the intersection of religion and sexuality while addressing the topic "From Dialogue to Action."
"I think some of our last and most bitter battles are going to be on the frontlines of religion," said Parvez Sharma, who directed A Jihad for Love and identifies as a gay Muslim man. "I think we see that happening already in pretty much every sphere of the world. And I think, more than most generations, ironically, it is you guys in the 21st century who will have to deal with the ramifications of a rise in all kinds of extremisms."
The panel, which was co-hosted by LGBT Change and the Queer Intercollegiate Alliance, also featured DePaul Hillel Program Director Nick Liebman, One Chicago One Faith organizer Kayla Higgins and DePaul Religious Studies Chair Fr. James Halstead.
Panelists opened the evening with personal anecdotes; they talked candidly about their families, upbringings and respective struggles with religion. Each person stressed that education, honest discourse and mutual understanding would be the keys to combatting the anti-LGBT sentiment that's become ingrained in many religious organizations.
"The biggest obstacle to breaking through these kinds of barriers is that … we put up our own walls," Liebman said. "We refuse to see the other as equally as human as we are. For me, that's a failure of faith on both sides." Liebman said that LGBT people who want nothing to do religious communities can be just as guilty of creating barriers as religious people who want nothing to do with queer communities.
"I think God created humanity in God's image," he said. "To take a swath of humanity and put them in a category you're not willing to deal with, is to say that someone can do that to you, is to say that we are not equal."
For his part, Halstead stressed total honesty. He says one of the things that annoys him most when discussing faith and sexuality is hearing the argument that God doesn't like or support gay people. "I think we'd all be better off not saying 'God wants' or 'God doesn't want,'" Halstead said. "Spare me God. Talk about yourself. And that's a priest saying that."
He went on to address the fallibility of the Catholic Church, noting that men—not God—drafted both the Bible and church doctrine. "I just think you [have to] say that certain things are just theological errors. Very well intended people for very good reasons in history have said things that are just simply wrong," Halstead said. "The Bible's not God. God is God. The notion that a human being understands the divine will—I think it's incredibly presumptuous to think that." The church's fallibility offers hope for change, Halstead said, but it'll take time and patience.
When a member of the audience asked Sharma how he negotiated his Muslim faith and his identity as a gay man, he shrugged and said simply, "I don't." Sharma said acceptance wasn't likely to come from religious institutions, but rather from the people who belong to them.
"Even though I'm pessimistic about trying to find a theological [Quran-based] solution to the problem of homosexuality," Sharma said, "I'm also very optimistic that young people … will perhaps be able to get rid of a lot of the baggage that comes with religious dogma and be able to come up with very different ways of understanding sexuality."
Liebman agreed, adding that one of the biggest problems with homosexuality in Judaism is that traditional Jewish life requires gender roles. "There isn't a language and tradition for gay people," he said. "Today our opportunity is to be a new paradigm, to go and actively be a part of these communities… And if, in fact, there are communities that just will not have gay people in them, the good news is there are plenty of communities that will. And it's our obligation to build those communities strong."
Mark Hannan, a member of the audience who works for a theological education nonprofit, lauded the forum's interfaith nature. "Coming from a Christian perspective," he said, "[it was great] to be able to see that there are similarities and possibilities for collaboration between different faiths that you typically don't see sitting at the same table anywhere, let alone organizing about LGBT issues."
