I think of religion the way I think of marriage: a great idea in theory, but in practice, it’s another matter.
I’ve discovered that marriage can live up to its theoretical promise, but religion seems even more difficult to get right, with intense economic, political, and institutional pressures to do it wrong, to allow the church’s sacred message of love to get mixed up with stuff that’s not sacred — like power and prejudice, lust and cupidity, misogyny.
I have my arguments with religion, God knows, but I have nothing but respect for women and men who commit their lives to their religions — the priests and ministers, the rabbis and imams, the monks and lamas and nuns, those whose religions call them to dedicate their lives to helping others.
In a world mad with greed, the Catholic Mass was the one place I could go each week to hear some earnest and realistic talk about charity, about love, about how to do it and where to find it. But that message of love was often betrayed by Church social policies and politics that denied the realities of gay and transgender people.
In his fifth-century tome “The City of God,” Saint Augustine distinguishes between the physical church as manifest here on earth and the “real” church as it exists in heaven as the body of Christ. Augustine’s idea held simply that the physical church was only ever an imperfect reflection of the true church and needed to continually be refined to accurately reflect the true church. Seventeenth-century Anglican historian Thomas Fuller put it this way: “As long as the church hath a form on Earth it will suffer deformities and consequently be in need of reformation.”
Reformation is a loaded word. I think of it rather as realignment. Straying from its sacred message from time to time (as in Nazi Germany or in the segregated American South), the church has periodically had to realign itself with the principles of Christ.
As a former Catholic, I spent 30 years arguing publicly against policies that seemed to me antithetical to scripture: the Church’s opposition to gays and gay marriage, its misogyny, its refusal to embrace our transgender population. I finally left the Church a decade ago when the Diocese of Juneau opposed CBJ’s proposed antidiscrimination ordinance on the grounds that it would deny to the local Church the Constitution’s guarantee of religious freedom.
But the ordinance would have done nothing to prevent individuals from worshipping as they chose. Rather, the Church wanted to be allowed in its hiring practices to discriminate against gay and transgender people. Simply put, the Diocese did not want to hire and thereby help feed, clothe, and shelter such people. It chose to protect its own institution over the wellbeing of individual men and women and children. But Christ’s stand against such institutionalism was unequivocal: the Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath (Mark 2:27).
CBJ passed the ordinance. To my knowledge, the Diocese never publicly apologized for its egregious misalliance with the voices of hate and intolerance, but it’s no matter. The Church now has a chance to find redemption in opposing the fascists and autocrats currently in power. The Diocese — now the Archdiocese of Anchorage-Juneau — can fight for our community by embracing Juneau’s transgender population.
Across the country, progress is being achieved for the Church to embrace gay, transgender and nonbinary Catholics. One of the earliest of such efforts, New Ways Ministry, founded in 1977, advocates for Catholic acceptance and justice for lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender Catholics. Other ministries such as Outreach and Fortunate Families continue to emerge in support of transgender Catholics. Most recently, in 2023, the Diocese of Davenport, Iowa, published a document, the first of its kind, on Guidelines for Pastoral Accompaniment of Sexual and Gender Minorities, elucidating the Gospel’s call to embrace those who feel threatened and experience a radical disassociation between their biological sex and expressed gender. One longtime Catholic advocate for LGBTQ+ communities, Dominican Sister Luisa Derouen, writes: “What transgender people experience is holy and good, not sinful or deluded or selfish.”
The Trump administration has now abandoned any commitment to civil rights and continues to level fresh attacks on the liberties and health of the most powerless and vulnerable among us — not just the transgender population, but outsiders of all kinds: immigrants, workers, students, children — the “least among you” (Matthew 25:45; Luke 9:48).
Now’s the time for the church to again echo clearly the message of the Gospels, to live up to its great promise and give its influential support to Americans who find their freedoms, their rights, their lives threatened. Now is the time for the Church — for all churches, all religions — to stand up for love.
If it makes that stand, the Church deserves our support, even in the face of other issues. If not, it’s time again for the Church to think seriously about some realignment.
• Jane Hale is a longtime resident of Juneau.
