Parallels of Persecution and Community Growth
Tony E Dillon-Hansen
27 Mar 2017
When reading the descriptions of persecution and
martyrdom, I am struck by the parallel with struggle for rights in today’s LGBT
and another group of people on the fringes.
There are several parallels between struggles of LGBT and
the early church. The type of persecution holds interesting parallel. When Gonzalez talks about the persecution by
the Romans being declared but not outright delivered (a kind of uneasy détente
at times), I am reminded of the persecution experienced against LGBT. In the LGBT community, I see evidence of this
type of persecution where sometimes invoked as a state policy, but its
invocation has been nonetheless convenient for some people as an excuse to
deliver a perverse sense of righteous violence upon people.
Of these, a parallel is the level of commitment and the
ability of members of the group to hide or to declare their involvement. It is
to be noted how people could hide their real-self and faith while playing
lip-service to live another day. LGBT could/can hide their respective
orientations or give lip-service to those that espouse to terminate these
ideas. This is not dissimilar to the early Christians that would yield against
Jews or the Roman “pagan” authorities.
For my own, I remember not wanting to disclose
orientation and attempted to hide via following the expected norms. I admit that I was scared for my own safety--
from more bullying, HIV, and a prevailing idea encompassing religion about
sexual orientation. During high school, I
did not really understand why I felt so different, and I was not willing to be
a confessor or a martyr. The only information I had about the LGBT community
was viewing the awful film “the Gay Agenda”, and I also observed how people
would easily ridicule the slightest prospect of being gay.
I was kind of alone in high school until I went to
college. I saw and met people while observing the reality of persecution, along
with art, education, and music that became part and distinct of the community.
We had a shared bond of not only our orientations but that we were consistently
under threat of exposure, violence or worse.
We did not have “communion”, but often, our groups would meet over
meals, potlucks or some safe-home get-together. We organized to provide
services to each other when no one else would, such as for youth, HIV-related
illness or a family outcast someone.
Even then, I remember and continue to see the scourge
that would ensue from people that would hide their sexuality and then use their
relationship to the community apparently to either in vain attempt to rid
themselves of their feelings or to exact revenge upon those that continued to
carry the torch of being LGBT. Pride festivals and being out in public offended
these because we disregarded the social punishment for a brief moment. On the
other hand, these hypocrites-in-hiding, by helping to torture and to hurt
people of the LGBT community, these people could somehow feel better about
themselves using labels of ex-gay, born-again or some other loose label through
the violence and threatening towards the LGBT community.
An interesting outcome, I remember discussions using
different vocabulary about how “pure” a person’s sacrifice was (physical
injury, loss of job, property damage, loss of family, or police that just
looked away). Was a person’s
inexperience with these sacrifices enough to justify whether they truly could
carry the banner for equality or LGBT recognition. Given the issue of confessors
in the early Church, the similarity is absolutely remarkable. Especially as
LGBT gained more mainstream recognition, the threats kind of subsided and the
ability to “come out” was less dangerous. Yet, those that chose to “convert” as straight
looked even more hollow to people in the community.
The experience of being in and growing with the community
in the 90s shaped me and pushed me into a position of fighting for rights.
Early into the 2000s, I would visit the Iowa legislature and find legislators
who would not even look at me without trying to look elsewhere. They would blame us for things like AIDS,
Hurricane Andrew and 9/11, and they would use logic (Logos) that had difficulty
standing up to scrutiny. What is evident
mostly is that Despite all the success of the recent decade, there is still
much work to be done, and the current political winds have shifted to resume
some of those old fears and persecutions.
There is another part of this early church that I find
compelling as in the “underground” aspect of the Church and the subsequent
changes as it became mainstream. This underground reminds me of the earlier
days of heavy metal music. Well into the 1980s, bands were playing and
recording a style of music labeled as “heavy metal” music, and the faithful
fans of these bands (early Metallica, Slayer, Iron Maiden, Judas Priest and
Black Sabbath) made up a genre with a distinct style of clothing, hair and
art. The style would invoke strong
“thrashing” power chords, rapid rhythms along with Gothic and its own black
arts, torn clothing (ripped jeans) and darker themes of isolation, broken
homes, satirical, anti-establishment—including anti-religion—rhetoric. Fans of the genre were often the butt of
jokes and the fringes of the crowd. I
remember that for a bunch of us – it became kind of rite of passage to finally
see one of these bands in live concert and then brandish their concert shirt to our friends the
following day at school. (Some shirts were too offensive for school
authorities). Yet together we had kinship and community.
That dark music genre found itself thrust into popularity
as part of the 90s progresses while the once niche and anti-establishment bands became
more mainstream—they were becoming the establishment. The dark styles evolved and incorporated less
“thrash” and the genre themes seemed to mellow as more people with “less-dark”
less anti-anything embraced this heavy metal style of music. For the community
that embraced the original style watched their music and bands turn into
corporate playhouses and inviting people in so many words, who were not pure
“metalheads.” (It is interesting how
purity finds its way into describing people).
The shining example of this was Metallica’s court case against Napster
and how scores of fans would not listen to Metallica thereafter, despite
growing up with their music. Napster
itself representing a rebellion of sorts against the larger music industry as
well as a way for people to discover music without having to fork over the cost
of albums.
The Church was “underground” in the early times shows the
parallel of this with early Christian churches growing from obscurity and
hiding in dark places and Christian family homes as well as somewhat
anti-Roman, anti-established religion into an “Imperial Church.”
To me, the early church experience showcases the
evolution of a community from obscurity into more acceptance and how people
both within and around the community impact that growth. There is the
additional lesson of how social groups evolve over time, developed niche
communities, especially the fringe, and then maybe find more popular acceptance
when given a chance. Yet these developed organically both for the Church, LGBT,
and music fanatics. These also show that
people both in and out of the fringe want badly to be part of a community to
share experiences, tales and relationships.
