RE: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Re: Nigeria's anti-gay law is a crime against reason

Please I will respond later in detail to the querries, but may I humbly say, why not just address me "Samuel" or "Zalanga?" Whatever I am is not important in this forum. I am just trying to share my humble observations, otherwise, there are persons in the forum who I could have been their student (and not the oldest one of such even) or their teaching assistant. I am from a rural community in Bauchi State Nigeria and not used to such status identification. So please, whatever I am does not matter in the forum just address me with my name.

Moreover, for me, given my experience in teaching a course on diversity, it is easy for many people to criticize homosexuality because it is cheap. For instance, I am not a homosexual, no one in my family is a homosexual, none of my children has that orientation, none of my friends is a homosexual. So I can say anything about it because it is something distant to me. But there are certain moral and ethical issues that are rooted in religion that if you were to hold me accountable about them, it will be more direct and personal and I will feel it just as I assume others will. But as for homosexuality, it is distant. The whole idea that homosexuality is 100% a question of taste or choice, assumes that it is functionally equivalent with someone going to a restaurant and choosing what they want on the menu. I am very confident that I will never be a homosexual. But that is not the end of the story. 

In the meantime before I respond, I want you to try to check out these documentaries and watch them because when I use them in class and students are really shocked about the situation. The documentaries approach the issue not from the simplistic position of abstract argument. And you will encounter leading scholars and very powerful stories that make the issue far more complicated than the simple question of the Bible Tells Me So, although I know the Qur'an is also against it. Here are the lists: 

a) The Bible Tells me So:  http://firstrunfeatures.com/forthebibletellsmesodvd.html

b) Trails of Ted Haggard: http://store.hbo.com/detail.php?p=107187&SESSID=6f4e09986b100a5b5278e429eb91c69a&v=hbo

c) The Laramie Project: http://www.amazon.com/Laramie-Project-Clea-Duvall/dp/B000067D0Y/ref=sr_1_1?s=movies-tv&ie=UTF8&qid=1390221984&sr=1-1&keywords=laramie+project

d) Middle Sexes: http://www.amazon.com/Middle-Sexes-Redefining-He-She/dp/B000HEVZ9Y/ref=sr_1_1?s=movies-tv&ie=UTF8&qid=1390222045&sr=1-1&keywords=Middlesexes

In the first documentary  (The Bible Tells Me So") you will find some Rabbis who understood and very well read the Old Testament. For instance, based on the Old Testament, if Christians are to honor the Bible, any sexual intercourse that is not for reproduction is considered a waste "biblically" and a violation of the law. So forget about the modern idea of using sexual intercourse for bonding and romantic love in order to strengthen marriage or relationship.

Second, Old Testament law does not allow people to wear clothes with different colors as some Rabbis declared with reference. Third, Old Testament law does not allow sowing two different seeds in one hole, which means genetic modification of seeds, cross-breeding and engineering that is done today is un-biblical. Yet much of what we eat today has some elements of cross breeding and genetic modification. Then in the Old Testament, a man "acquires" a wife. Does that sound comfortable today? A woman is not supposed to go to public worship for some time after childbirth or during menstruation.  Are we willing to enforce all that law today? Many Rabbis make a distinction between the letter and the spirit of the law, but Christians just use the scriptures without carefully understanding the culture contexts of the scriptures. The Old Testament and even the New Testament was not written with the sole purpose of guiding people thousands of years later. The people were human beings trying to spiritually make sense of their own world. And if you come to the New Testament, why not demand Christians to sell all what they have and bring the money to the church for sharing, and those that make false statements about what they have, receive a death sentence as in the book of Acts. Why not introduce the year of Jubilee where all debts are forgiven every seven years in order not to create an inter-generational group of paupers or debtors. Would this not be good in our modern capitalist economy? Did not Christian say the Bible is everything to them? Here, I am encouraging the Christian to live up to his or her claim and not to dissuade him. He or she cannot argue with me about that. If he or she realizes he cannot handle all that was said, then maybe he or she needs some dose of humility.

In the "Middle Sexes" you will see how with medical records people are born with a man's physical body but a woman's brain or doctors cannot classify their gender. There is the case of little Noah in Wisconsin who is a boy having a woman's brain. I saw a documentary on NOVA, public television science program, and when you see the sequencing of genes or whatever they call them, you will appreciate that human body is so complicated such that if one of genes is not in its proper location, anything can happen to human nature or behavior.

In the Laramie Project, you will see the danger of creating a social environment that takes away the humanity of people because they are gay, thereby allowing other people to kill them in gruesome way which then embarrasses even people who oppose homosexuality because they realize the language they used took away the humanity of the people. I was depressed seeing the homosexuals arrested in Bauchi, Nigeria, my home state. Before Hitler started killing the Jews, the first thing he did was to use certain discourse to take away their humanity, which then exonerated the consciences of his people to kill the Jewish people and sleep well. This was what led Hannah Arendt developed the concept of "the banality of evil.". Even someone like Jerry Falwell at one point after Matthew Shepherd  (a gay) was killed in Idaho (which is the subject of the "Laramie Project" he had to meet with gay people because he realized his language on the pulpit created a conducive environment for some gullible people to commit acts of violence. As I watched the documentary, I saw clearly as a Christian how religion can be used for violence. And I decided to take a stand against that. Simply because I am straight does not mean that I am holy or pious.

In The Trials of Ted Haggard, you will find out that Haggard was the former president of the National Association of Evangelicals in the U.S., an organization that was crucial for the reelection of President Bush Junior. He was a shining star and everything was going for him. For a man like him with five children, a great wife and great influence, to get involved in homosexuality, just defies all the simplistic understanding of homosexuality as just a question of simple choice and preference. Moreover, when he lost his position, there is something unchristian in the way the church treated him. The church was never supportive. Yet there is another documentary entitled "Friends of God" where Haggard was then a pastor and he was on camera asking some men in the documentary how often they have sexual intercourse etc. with their wives. My students feel embarrassed when they see it because some of the questions are even more specific than this. He concluded that Christians have the best sex life in the world, but he would later be found to be a homo-sexual. Please check out the story. There is so much to lose for him and based on rational choice theory which is the foundation of many of our conceptions of human beings today, and also informing how we design our institutions, there is no reason for him to do that. If you say it is just because he is simply sinful, then you are assuming that simply because people are not homosexuals, they have no sin in some area of their lives or that one day because of sin, you and I will also be gay. I do not think the issue is as simple as such, no matter how you feel about it. 

What if as a heterosexual, every day I go out and I see a woman and have a lust for her. If you truly want to enforce Jesus' teaching, you will have to commit the government of Nigeria to develop a technology that can see through people's mind so that when they have those thoughts you can arrest them and convict them because they have violated a moral law. And you have to go to their houses to check the possible use of pornographic material. More complicated what if a husband and wife decided to use pornography? Is it acceptable religiously? What do you do about that? Or are you assuming that there are no Nigerians using pornographic material? Jesus did not make any distinction between sexual act itself and the lust for it in an inappropriate context. If your goal is puritanical Christian living in a modern world, try it out. But if you do so, it means you should change Nigerian constitution from that of liberal democracy to something else. There is a limit to how far the state can go in terms of running people's lives in a liberal democracy. The unfortunate thing is that there are many public goods that the Nigerian state should provide but it is not doing so. Instead it is investing itself in this area. Why? I always tell my students that those who do not appreciate the difficulty of living out your faith in a modern world have not carefully studied the evolution of humankind and the crisis of modernity.  Often they just read the Bible and say this is the truth, ignoring the social reality they live in.

Many parents in the U.S. changed their simplistic condemnation of homosexuality when their beloved children committed suicide leaving them a suicide note behind because the parents refused to recognize their sexual orientation. One of my favorite gospel singers Ray Boltz, married with a family, came out and identified himself as Gay. You wonder why someone will do that given that everything was going for him.

 I will also suggest checking out the book "With God On Our Side: The Rise of the Religious Right in America and you will see what Conservative Forces, Moral Majority, and the Religious Roundtable stood for and now in hindsight many of them realized that by just focusing narrowly on scripture and not trying to understand the logic of their society, they made terrible mistake by wasting too much time in opposing things that have now become mundane. Many Christians fail to examine the structure of modern society, its evolution and the crisis it has created for human kind. They embrace capitalism and modernity and even see it as by-product of or blessing of Christianity. But Nietzsche understood the crisis that Christianity or traditional morality faced with the advent of modernity which according to Weber, rationalization is an unending process of the increasing expansion of instrumental rationality which constitutes the prism from which people view social reality.

Nietzsche realized that modernity removed God as the center of people's moral moorings. Morality in modern society cannot be anchored in God because he has been de-centered. In many respects he is backup plan for many people in the sense that people pray on something only when they know that there is no scientific explanation that solidly accounts for what happened. The puritans came here with great enthusiasm for religion but later one of the Puritan Divine wrote that, Christianity gave birth to prosperity in America but prosperity turned around and committed matricide.  With regard to how modernity can interfere with your thinking even when you think you are a Christians, here is an example. When I applied for a Nigerian passport in the 1990s when I was preparing to come to the U.S., I took the application to my church so that the pastor can pray on it. Doing so will guarantee that I get "favor" in the eyes of the bureaucrats.  The prayer was not transform the system but so that the Holy Spirit can navigate me even when other people who are unbelievers suffer. Yet, when I became an American citizen, because the society is rationalized and what I get in terms of the approval of my passport application is not a favor, frankly I did not pray before going to the post office to apply. I did not care who was in the post office that day and whether he liked me or not, let alone ask for his favor. He was by law duty-bound to serve me if I demanded a service in compliance with the law. So here is what Nietzsche perceptively says about the crisis of modernity with regard to people looking for solid assurance:

We have left the land and have gone aboard ship! We have broken down the bridge behind us, -- nay, more, the land behind us!  Well, little ship look out!  Besides thee is the ocean.... Times will come when thou wilt feel that it is infinite... Alas, if home sickness for the land should attack thee, as if there had been freedom there, -- and there is no more "land" any longer.

What many of us are struggling with which is implied in this quote is, out of excitement about modernity and the possibilities that it creates, we boarded the ship of modernity, we destroyed the harbor and the land, and sailed straight to the ocean with all the great opportunities it  provides. After traveling very far into the ocean, we realized that we have lost our North Pole i.e., our bearing or mooring, in religious terms "God." So we are afraid of moving forward or continuing the journey in the ocean because we feel uncomfortable with the infinite possibilities that we see ahead of us, water that is unending, kind of. The sea gives us no horizon, we become confused. This is the crisis of morality that modernity has brought upon us, which many religious people fail to explore or appreciate Nietzsche because they think he is a madman. We feel we want to go back to land (i.e., the moral certainties of the past) but it is too late because the exact land that you knew (tradition) is no more there even if you desire to go back. So what do you do? There is some kind of agony and lament. This is the reality of the religious person in late modernity.

As you can see, I lament this crisis. But I have devoted time to understand it and frankly, I tell anyone who cares in my school, that talking simplistically about religion without appreciating the crisis that modernity, especially advanced modernity has brought upon us is naive. And you have not seen the end yet. I want you to reflect on this deep crisis of modernity instead of just simply talking about moral law with regard to homo-sexuality.  It is easy for all of us to say that. If the issue is as simple as that, tell Jonathan to eradicate corruption in Nigeria which is biblically condemned and also condemned by Islam.  It is not because I do not care about the morality that I am making my case, but the difference between us is that I am willing to understand the evolution and complexity of society first, in this case modernity and then relate it to scripture. And in doing that I realize that the mindset we have today, is not in tune with exact mindset of people during the days of scripture. Many western theologians just want to regurgitate the truth in the Bible even though that is not as straight as they think. This is the reason why Liberation theologians got tired of this approach to religious thinking that ignores their concrete historical realities in Latin America. Note also that to appreciate the Bible, do not start reading it from Genesis, start from Psalms 137. Why? Because the book of Genesis was composed during or after the Babylonian Exile, which was a traumatic historical experience in the history of the Jews and therefore it informed which stories they chose to tell, how they told it and what kind of emphasis needed to be made. Furthermore, monotheism was never a full blown idea among the people of Israel. It evolved over time. When they were in Egypt they did not believe in monotheism, because monotheist deny the existence of other deities, there is only one deity and the correct one which is their own. With the Babylonian conquest the history in the Old Testament will be different.

To worsen things, even people who say they believe in God, research indicates (see: America's Four Gods" by Frose and Bader -- http://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2010/november/21.65.html), they fail to appreciate the fact that people may believe in God but they do not mean the same thing when they say “God.” The God of the slave master was never the same as the God of the slave. The God of the slave master created human beings in his image with their dignity, but he later changed his mind and said we black people lack intelligence and it is his will that we should be guided by being enslaved in our own interest. The God of the slave however is a God that recognizes the slaves’ human dignity and humanity. Even if they are in the same church, the slave master and slave do not worship the same God. And if they did, then that god must be confused himself about his moral and ethical principles, let alone providing clear moral guidance to other people. Please check this book which highlights what I am talking about here: The Negro Church in America/The Black Church since Frazier (Sourcebooks in Negro History) [Paperback] E. Franklin Frazier.

Some theologians just use the term (i.e., God) and move on, but we sociologist know that people may use the same term but they may not mean the same thing by the term and that is why one needs to be careful in designing questionnaire by doing pilot study, otherwise people will answer the questions but they interpreted the questions differently, which affects validity and reliability. This question of different meanings of God is not just true in the U.S. but even in Nigeria or Africa, if anyone cares to study it, they will find the same thing happening, even if with slight differences. I am not just talking about the contrast between Islam and Christianity but even within Christianity itself.

According to Froese and Bader and Baylor University, there are four broad different ways that people in America think about God and depending on which one of them you gravitate to, one can predict your moral standing on certain issues by knowing your position on the concept of God that you are inclined to believe. But more importantly, which of the four positions you gravitate to is not something that happens in random but rather a product of, or it is shaped by your past social and historical experiences. At this point, you are in the territory of Karl Marx.  The only way to avoid Marx here or to mitigate the implication of his analysis of religion is to be humble and to know that humans cannot talk about God outside their experience because they are creatures. 

In terms of how people become religious, Susan Kwilecki, Professor of Religious Studies at Radford University, Virginia, summarized arguments, which she labeled as the “interactional axiom,” through which individuals cultivate faith commitment.  Her analysis, and resulting theory, addressing why and how people become religious is also useful for better understanding what social-psychological forces drive individuals to commit to a religion. She asserted that:

a)      “An individual first learns he or she is surrounded by supernatural forces as a member of a group (family, religious community, subculture, culture).  Collective traditions supply the raw materials from which personal religions are constructed” (Kwilecki, 1999:38).

b)      “Each potential believer approaches with individualized needs, relational histories, dispositions, abilities and vulnerabilities, developmental failures, and achievements. Thus the uniqueness or particularity of each personal religion” (Kwilecki, 1999:40, “Becoming Religious”).

Moreover as I said earlier, in Nigeria, Christianity and Islam have penetrated our culture and consciousness but their impact on public morality and affairs is debatable at best and at worst, negative, since even though I am not as old as some Nigerians on this forum, I know that when I was young in my community, while people still had moral and ethical lapses, yet there was far more fear of God or respect for public morality than today. Today, we have more churches, more mosques, more copies of the Bible and Qur'an per capita in Nigeria, more memory verses memorized from the Qur'an and the Bible, more pilgrimages to Mecca and Jerusalem to instil God's fear in people's heart, but the empirical evidence about how this positively impact morality is clearly unimpressive. Indeed, when Jonathan went on pilgrimage to Jerusalem, the prayed for the Minister of Aviation but they did not scold her because of her greed. According to news, many people did not say “amen” to the prayer. And then now they come and sign a law against homosexuals and they want me because of my Christian faith to support them  and believe Jonathan is a God-fearing, moral and ethical leader. Give me a break. There is more order and social trust in Scandinavian countries which are less religious compared to Nigeria or African countries. Actually, the empirical evidence suggests that the most religious countries in the world are also the most highly unequal (“Religion and Inequality Go Hand in Hand:  http://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2011/septemberweb-only/religioninequality.html).

Here too in the United States, you might want to check this book: "The Juvenilization of American Christianity" (see the reference:  http://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2012/june/when-are-we-going-to-grow-up.html).  So the problem is not just in Nigeria or Africa. Here is a quote from the book to illustrate to you the moral crisis set in motion by modernity:

"Older cultural conceptions of adulthood encouraged responsibility, self-denial, and service of others. In the first half of the twentieth century, most people clearly entered adulthood in their teens or early twenties by virtue of getting married, getting a job, and having children. More recently, the passage to adulthood has been delayed and rendered more subjective for most middle-class Americans, In this new "psychological adulthood," the individual’s "needs and wants" expand and his or her "obligations and attachments" contract. The seven deadly sins have been redefined: pride has become self-esteem... lust has become sexuality... ,  envy is now channeled into initiative and incentive.. sloth has become leisure  .. In short at least some traits that should be included in Christian maturity have been decoupled from adulthood in post-1960s America, and this change has encouraged juvenilization in churches.  Indeed, it is likely that the juvenilization of American Christianity and the emergence of the new immature adulthood have mutually reinforced each other (p.6).

And to support my claim about the weakness of Christians or religious scholars who just look at the scripture and preach and preach about it without looking at the anthropology and sociology of their societies, here is what some of the leaders of Moral Majority Movement in the United States who are conservative evangelicals had to say in hindsight about their struggle to eradicate immorality in America:

“Even so, Tomas and Dobson remarked throughout the book on the failure of the movement, for all its appearance of power, to advance its agenda very much. Dobson notes that twenty years after the emergence of the Moral Majority Movement:

 Even a casual observation of the current moral climate suggests that despite all the time, money, and energy -- despite the political power... we failed. Things have not gotten better; they have gotten worse... Crime is still rampant, judging from the overcrowding in our prisons. Drugs are even more readily available to our children than they were twenty years ago. Pornography has moved from the back shelf to the television sets in our living rooms. The number of abortions performed each year has declined only slightly. Homosexuality is shrugged off as an acceptable, alternative lifestyle. And even within our churches, divorce rates continue to climb, mirroring those of people who do not attend church" From: Cal Thomas and Ed Dobson, Blinded by Might: Can the Religious Right Save America?, 1999, p.50).

My point in citing all this is not that I am embarking on a campaign to promote homo-sexuality just as I believe there are many people who oppose the Nigerian anti-homosexuality law but are not by any means embarking on a campaign to promote homosexuality.  But given what I have learned and read, I just do not like religious people who think they can just read holy books without some thorough, historical, anthropological and sociological understanding / reflection on the evolution and trajectory of their society.

Two or three years after I started teaching, I told students in a graduate class in a Christian school that if I am alive, no one will be debating homosexuality by the time I am in a nursing home. I said so after reading Eric Forner's “The Story of American Freedom."  My statement was grounded in some historical understanding and appreciation of the forces that shaped the evolution of American history, good and bad. And I am still alive and in very short time America has changed.

Note that as we are celebrating Martin Luther King Jr. holiday in the U.S. today, as at the time I came to the U.S. in the 1990s, many states did not recognize his public holiday. And do not assume that when the Civil Rights Act was passed, people just all rushed to the streets to celebrate a new dawn in American history. There were many people who did not like it, and they use Biblical arguments to oppose it just as they used Biblical arguments to justify slavery. Interestingly, according to religious studies scholars, in terms of text proofing (i.e, “biblicism”), the people who said the Bible support slavery had more evidence to support their case than people who opposed that position. They said if slavery was inherently and morally wrong and evil, God will not liberate the Israelites from Egypt out of slavery and then allow them to either go and commit genocide or enslave other people in the so-called “Promised Land.” The Promise Land was for the Israelites but not all human beings and today there are Christians too who think they are entitle d all the blessings of the world and the whole world is theirs by faith because they are born-again. But anyone who is NOT a Christian is like an "antelope" in the bush which can be hunted because he or she does not have God's protection. Religion can be used for both good and evil and which one becomes profound in terms of usage depends on who is the religious person in reference. As one scholar said, there is no religion, without religious people. We need to be careful.

My specific response to your message will come later. This is just some preliminary reflections.  Thank you very much indeed.

Samuel