By Brent Russo
Contributing Writer
Convocation never does much for me. I have had my fill of hyper-enthusiastic Christian singing troupes, middle-aged men’s advice on relationships, aristocratic ceremonies and the general rehashing of Church of Christ doctrine. I have even had my fill of Holocaust survivors.
Occasionally, however, a Convocation offers something progressive – something that provokes thought and debate and is relevant to the world beyond Pepperdine University. Last week’s Moral Compass Series, a forum for discussing alternative biblical interpretations of homosexuality, was met with great attendance, suggesting that it was one such Convocation, a spark of controversy at a university where everything is typically black and white.
If the forum fostered, as Justin Kerr wrote in last week’s Graphic, “confusion and division,” it is only evidence for the discussion’s success. Students should be skeptical of certainty and embrace a diversity of ideas and beliefs.
Ironically, this perspective reversed the very mission of the Moral Compass Series. It twists the forum’s intent to claim that “the Moral Compass Series ostracizes those committed to traditional readings of Scripture.” This is a gross attempt to disguise the truth of the matter: The ostracized are not the fundamentalist Christians, who form an amorphous majority on this campus, but the homosexuals themselves.
At Pepperdine, the martyrdom does not belong to the Christians but to the homosexuals.
Only two years ago, a Pepperdine student was expelled from the Let’s Start Talking program on account of his associations with the Gay, Lesbian, and Straight Alliance. The homosexual has consistently been deemed “the other,” the deviant, relative to the heterosexual, or preferred, norm. That Pepperdine University even hosted something like the Moral Compass Series to show differing positions on homosexuality is an admirable step forward.
The initial mistake is to suggest that there is some universal, all-encompassing intrinsic “conviction” in Scripture. This allows criticism toward anyone who attempts to conform this conviction to his or her own opinions.
The Bible, however, does not lend itself to any such strict reading, laden as it is with euphemisms and contradictions. Its sheer breadth precludes any uncompromising interpretation.
Homosexuality is not the first issue for which this biblical dogma has proved problematic. Scripture has been interpreted as tolerating slavery as much as it has been interpreted as protesting homosexuality. Most Christians, however, have no problem interpreting the Bible as a superior vision of morality that condemns human bondage. For fundamentalists, handcuffed as they are by Scripture, the situation is an either-or: Either they interpret the Bible as a superior morality, or they use the Bible as a crutch for immorality; either they attempt to include homosexuals in the congregation, or they use the Bible as ammunition against them.
Kerr claimed that biblical interpretations that offer acceptance to homosexuals have only come up in the last 30 years and that “the 2,000 to 3,000-year-old belief that describes sex between two males as an abomination” is the more valid, time-tested view. First, homosexuality is not exclusive to males; second, just because an idea has been around a while does not make it a good idea. Homosexuality has been around at least 3,000 years; by Kerr’s logic, it is an extraordinary idea.
According to many who share the conservative standpoißnt, the issue is petty — petty, perhaps, if you are in the heterosexual majority and able to talk and joke openly about your sexual orientation. The Moral Compass Series is designed to lure such close-mindedness out of its Scriptural shell and heighten awareness of what is — far from petty — a very significant matter.
The Moral Compass Series was far from a terrible idea. Quite the contrary: It was an attempt to clue in fundamentalist stragglers to a moral outlook already accepted by an unprejudiced majority of the secular world.
October 30, 2003