By Joe Perez
Who owns Jesus? Can Jesus legitimately be a symbol for “pro-family” and “pro-gun” politics? Andrew Sullivan is doubtful. I think there is enough ambiguity in the Scripture for Jesus to be appropriated by a wide variety of theologies and ideologies each of which have claims of legitimacy relative to their own worldview with their own complex benefits and baggage. An Integral spiritual approach to politicians and religionists who would make an exclusive claim to the truth about Jesus is not to assert a conflicting exclusive claim to the truth about Jesus.
The way forward for Gay Spirituality ought to be based on an Integral Methodological Pluralism, which can be simplified (as I did in 2006′s Rising Up) by saying that we need multiple and apparently conflicting and irreconcilable approaches to combating homophobia within the religions. Multiple and apparently conflicting approaches to healing the homophobia are already happening, praise be to God, so the Integral approach does not require a radical break from the overall status quo, broadly seen. Spirit is already moving in our midst in a direction of healing and reconciliation, and our activism is best informed by the maximum degree of openness to Spirit at our own individual level of consciousness and life situation.
For Catholics such as Andrew Sullivan, that can certainly allow for his own rejection of so-called Christianists. But it does not require the rest of us to read Scripture as he does. There are passages which call for total non-violence. There are also passages which call for taking up swords. There is not only one authentic Christianity, but many versions infused with different worldviews — pre-modern, modern, postmodern, and beyond. Sullivan’s “My Way is the Way” approach may work for his own post-traditional theology, but respectfully it is not a universal prescription. Ultimately our activism must entail non-violence in action and non-violence in the “culture war” which pits pre-modern, modern, and postmodern worldviews against each other without a holistic embrace of each worldview as a moment in something greater and more loving, something that we might call an evolving World Spirituality.
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