68. ABUSIVE THEOLOGY - Why LGBTQ+ Students Deserve Better From RE

Imagine a teacher starts a lesson with a statement written on the board: “It is wrong to be a racist”.  They then ask the class if they agree.  The class do, but the teacher then says this lesson is about developing evaluation skills and understanding other people’s viewpoints, so they will spend the rest of the lesson considering in detail all the arguments racists might make to justify their discriminatory views.  They not only consider them but treat them with respect.  “Some people might say racism is unacceptable,” the teacher says, “but you have to understand that people from this particular background sincerely believe that the people of a particular ethnicity are subhuman and not worthy of equal moral consideration, and this belief is deeply held within their community…” 

The next week there’s another statement on the board: “It is wrong to commit domestic violence”.  Again, they ask the class if they agree and, happily, everyone does.  But the teacher reiterates that we have to consider all viewpoints so we can properly evaluate the proposition.  Once again, the class find themselves learning arguments against the statement so that they can all write an essay with equally compelling arguments for each side.   “Some people might say that it is wrong to commit domestic violence, but others would argue…” 

The two scenarios are intentionally absurd.  Not only absurd, but we can see something is seriously wrong here.  While it might be useful to consider the rationale given for deplorable positions in order to better bolster opposition of them, the idea that such viewpoints should be respected or considered viable, swilled about in the mind and given the potential for equal assent alongside the clearly more humane and demonstrably more defensible anti-racist and anti-domestic violence statements would be something I would expect people to rightly complain about. 

“What did you learn in school today?” 

“Why it might be OK to beat my child and why certain races shouldn’t have the same rights as others.” 

I would expect at the very least a strongly worded email to the Head, if not a full-on Ofsted inspection looking into what the hell was going on.  Maybe even a police investigation? 

And yet, in May 2019 the AQA exam board asked GCSE RE students to respond the following statement: “It is wrong to disapprove of homosexual relationships”.  Like the two examples above, the statement seems at first glance to be doing the right thing.  Just as, theoretically, the racism and domestic violence statements were clearly not condoning racism or domestic violence, the AQA question statement here is on the right side of morality, telling us it is wrong to disapprove of homosexual relationships, not encouraging us to do so.  Except, the 12 mark AO2 evaluation essay the students are expected to write requires them to cover both sides of the so-called “debate”.  One can only get a maximum of six marks for considering only a single point of view.  Anything more requires “consideration of different points of view”, and the mark scheme makes it clear what this means.  “Some religious believers see homosexuality as against natural law”, it suggests students may answer against the statement.  “Much religious teaching condemns homosexuality” it reminds them, and that teaching “cannot be explained away because it is old and inconvenient.”  And amongst the tired old argument that “a key point of human relationships is to have children” and “much religious teaching is focused on the continuation of the family and tribe” (a view which writes off not only homosexual relationships that cannot lead to natural childbirth but any relationship at all which does not result in offspring) we teachers marking the exam are also told to accept the possible argument that “human sexuality is a choice made by the individual” and “to be homosexual is to make the wrong choice.” 

As a teacher of RE, and head of RE at my school, that we RE teachers are supposed to give oxygen to such ignorant and discriminatory views in our classrooms – and treat their prejudice and hurt as something that is to be respected – is something I find an outrage.  Yet by framing the issue in this way on their exam specification that is exactly what the AQA exam board is asking us to do.  And they are not alone.  Similar questions existed on the old specification I used to teach from the OCR, and before I was even a teacher I remember my mother – an English teacher late in her career – was asked to cover an Edexcel GCSE RE lesson at her school and was so shocked by what she saw in the textbooks she’d been instructed to hand out that she abandoned the teacher’s planned lesson and spoke frankly instead to her students about how wrong those messages were.  My school, like most schools, have clear policies against homophobia and homophobic bullying.  If a student were to say the things which are found in the 2019 AQA mark scheme, they would be challenged in any part of the school.  Yet, apparently, in the RE classroom, we are not only not supposed to challenge such views, we have to teach them to our students and give them marks for repeating them which they would not be able to access were their work not to have them. 

Earlier this year, in the book, Reforming RE, Mark Chater named the discomfort I have always felt about this sort of thing in the RE curriculum as “complicity in abusive theology”.  Chater points out that, while abuse can happen in all sorts of contexts, “only in religious organisations does abusive behaviour stem from sacred texts or doctrines of authority” and that “teaching about these texts and doctrines is dangerous precisely because abusive theology can lead to abusive behaviour, can be used as a justification for actual abuse, and is known to foster self-hatred and self-victimisation.”  He’s not wrong.  In my time as a teacher I have seen LGBTQ+ students suffer at the hands of their family and friends because who they are has been deemed a sin within their faith.  Students have been taken away by social services after physical attacks from family members stemming from coming out about their sexuality or gender.  Others have had to deny their true self until they are old enough to leave home and never look back.  Most recently a student came to see me as Head of RE to ask if it was possible within their faith (Islam) to be both Muslim and gay.  They needed to know because their Muslim friends had not only told them it was impossible, but that if they identified as gay they ought to be killed.  And this was not the first time they had heard this said.  Knowing they were gay for a long time, they felt forced to reject their faith for many years because they believed the two things were incompatible, but now more comfortable with their sexuality they no longer wanted to feel bullied out of their religion.  They wanted to believe in God – the God of Islam, the God they had grown up with – but had been told repeatedly over the years that this was a God who would condemn them to hell for being who they are.  A God who apparently calls for their murder simply for being the person they were made by that God to be. 

I explained to the student that their sexuality and their religion was between them and God and no-one else gets to tell them what they can and can’t believe.  If they are both Muslim and gay then, guess what, gay Muslims exist.  As the old Stonewall slogan goes: get over it.  I pointed them in the direction of other gay Muslims tackling the same perceptions and prejudice they were experiencing and reminded them that scripture is always more indicative of the time it was written in and the people who compiled it than it is of any unquestionable divine will.  In Islam specifically, the passages condemning homosexuality are open to interpretation and, if believed to be the genuine word of God and not merely the questionable product of dated and all-too human cultural norms, are just as easily a condemnation against violence and lack of sexual consent then they are a condemnation of being gay.  I reminded them that in Islam the gravest sin is shirk – equating something to God – and that those trying to speak for God and putting words in God’s mouth about homosexuality are therefore far more likely to be punished on the Day of Judgement than those gay Muslims living a good life in a loving same-sex relationship.   

But imagine being that student, already feeling alienated from their faith and bullied by their classmates, at last feeling a little relieved only to revise for their GCSE exam and look at what the AQA mark scheme says: “homosexuality and therefore homosexual relationships are against Islam” and “the Qur’an sets out severe punishment which can include the death penalty”.  The Qur’an does not, in fact, recommend the death penalty for homosexuality, though some have historically reasoned analogously for it from the death penalty the Qur’an does suggest for adultery, but the AQA merely assure the young LGBTQ+ student that because “the death penalty is not stipulated in the Qur’an” as an alternative “many Muslim states” use “jail or corporal punishment” were they to be openly gay there instead.  Great.  And while the mark scheme concedes “some Muslims do argue that it is possible to be homosexual and Muslim and argue that it is homosexual lust condemned in the Qur’an and not faithful homosexual love” they then add that “even amongst ‘liberal’ Muslims this view is controversial”, immediately demeaning its legitimacy.   

Talk about complicity in abusive theology.   

Likewise, when teaching Christian views on the issue I am, according to the exam board, meant to tell a young LGBTQ+ Christian that “some Christians distinguish between homosexual orientation and practice regarding only the latter as sinful”.  In other words – don’t worry, you won’t go to hell in your religion so long as you deny yourself love and physical intimacy for the rest of your joyless life. 

Speaking about this sort of thing a while ago with another RE teacher I know who personally holds traditional Christian views on homosexuality I asked them if they felt an LGBTQ+ student would feel comfortable in their class knowing that, in their teacher’s opinion, they were doomed to hell for simply openly being who they were and not living a miserable and chaste life of self-denial?  (I know I would certainly feel uncomfortable being myself around such a teacher were I that student.)  What I was really wondering though was what discussions on the issue looked like in that classroom compared to the discussions I have in mine.  Would the student who came to ask me for my advice have somewhere to go for help were they a student at this other teacher’s school?  As Head of Department in my own school, I at least have some control over the curriculum we teach and purposefully don’t teach the Religion and the Family unit which contained the offending question in the GCSE precisely because I want us to have no part in promoting that kind of backwards thinking to our students.  We only cover religion and homosexuality within the context of the Social Justice and Human Rights unit, which allows us to focus on equality and LGBTQ+ rights in the face of attempted religious discrimination.  But in other schools?  Who knows?  Would they start their lesson like the imaginary teachers we met at the start of this essay?  A statement about homosexuality on the board and then proceeding to fill their students’ heads with all the abusive theology any other department in a school would be severely reprimanded for peddling but which apparently can earn an RE department good GCSE grades?     

The teacher assured me that though their personal faith may condemn acts of homosexuality, it condemns the act and not the person.  It also promotes being loving towards all people.  They wouldn’t treat an LGBTQ+ student any differently than any other student. 

“Except,” I pointed out, tired of the narrative that all of this was OK, “while supposedly treating them lovingly you are still actively judging them to be sinful simply for loving who they love and believe them to be doomed to burn in hell for all eternity if they act on instincts you, and others like you, are lucky enough to be able to fulfil without judgment or punishment.  Which,” I concluded, “isn’t actually very loving at all.” 

Religion is allowed to repeat its abusive theology with very little social censure and promote its bigotry because it carries with it a veil of both respectability and deniability.  Respectability, because we have seen the consequences of religious intolerance and prejudice.  Who are we to judge the deeply held beliefs of others, we might ask ourselves, even if they are so very different than our own?  That way leads to the holocaust.  And deniability because whatever despicable thing comes out of the mouth of the faithful believer can so easily be disavowed with a shrug of the shoulders as being “not my words, but God’s words.”  We are fearful of challenging any of that because to do so with reason, argument and logic, entails the possible crumbling of a house of cards.  To get from an explicit admonition against homosexuality in a holy book purported to be the word of God to LGBTQ+ acceptance requires at least one of the following changes of interpretation, all of which the religious believer is likely to resist.  Either  

1)    The book is wrong – not the divine word of God but a human creation or human corruption.

Or

2)    God is wrong – God might have said it then, but times have changed and God – supposedly eternal and omniscient – is now out of date. 

And if the scripture, or God, is wrong on this one issue, then who’s to say where else they are wrong, or if God even exists at all?  Option (1) takes away a significant part of the proof for God used by many of the faithful, meanwhile option (2) leaves any existing deity as a far more impoverished conception than the traditional sort of God people believe to be worthy of our worship.  If we pull that first loose string who knows what else will unravel?  So we don’t.  We are respectful.  We bite our tongues.  And become complicit in abusive theology as a result. 

While UK schools in 2020 are certainly better for LGBTQ+ students than they were when I was at school and Section 28 was still the law, forbidding the “promotion of homosexuality” in any state school and causing years of misery for many teachers and students, it is time that teachers, parents, politicians and LGBTQ+ campaigners set their sights on this remaining hang-on from those dark and unacceptable days gone by. Currently it is the law that all secondary schools in England should teach RE, and, as a result of our education system’s obsessive emphasis on qualifications and exams, in many of those schools that RE provision means the teaching of the GCSE and thus the frequent inclusion of this toxic pocket of anti-LGBTQ+ propaganda on the curriculum of schools otherwise doing all that they can to promote LGBTQ+ inclusivity.   

We do not have to be respectful of hate speech, and we do not have to be timid in challenging prejudice. Just because the prejudice or the hate may have religious origins and scripture to back it up doesn’t make it any less reprehensible.  Racism, domestic violence, homophobia…these are not matters of personal choice like, perhaps, whether to eat meat, drink alcohol, or support euthanasia.  These are lines in the sand we draw as a society to say human rights are equal rights and no one should face fear, prejudice, violence or discrimination because of the colour of their skin, their domestic situation, or the person that they love.  That the issue of LGBTQ+ rights remains up for debate in the RE classroom in 2020 means it is either time to update the RE curriculum to reflect the values of our time and call out theology we can now see to be abusive for what it really is, or it is time to replace RE entirely with something unbeholden to the sort of outdated bigotry and embedded intolerance that can “other” our students and deny them their very humanity.      

 Author: DaN McKee

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