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Soulforce and the Catholic Church Soulforce
and the “Long and Arduous Quest After Truth” Soulforce believes that homosexual activity is not sinful, and that to call it a sin is to spread “false and inflammatory misinformation about lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgendered people.” They believe that “these teachings lead to discrimination, suffering, and death.” They want all religious groups to embrace the teaching that God accepts homosexuals exactly the way they are, and that homosexual activity is not a sin. Based on their beliefs, they say that the Catholic Church’s teachings on sexuality constitute “spiritual violence” directed towards lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgendered people. Their response to this “spiritual violence” is a series of protests directed not only at the Catholic Church, but also at Southern Baptists, United Methodists, Presbyterians, Episcopalians, Lutherans, and others. Soulforce takes its name from the Indian word, satyagraha. “Soul force,” according to the group’s website, “is one of the names Gandhi (and later Dr. [Martin Luther] King) gave to the principles of relentless nonviolent resistance. Both civil rights leaders believed that we were created to do justice and that when we take one step in that direction it renews our spirit (releases our own ‘soul force’) as it helps transform our society.” Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. explains satyagraha in this way: “Satya is truth which equals love, and agraha is force; ‘Satyagraha,’ therefore, means truth force or love force.” Gandhi also translates satyagraha as “truth force,” and subtitles his autobiography “The Story of My Experiments with Truth.” For both Gandhi and King, satyagraha is the strength that comes from a life lived in conformity with the truth. Gandhi and King are both essentially believers in Natural Law: they believe that God created the universe with a certain order, and that racial injustice violates that order. Therefore, by basing their message on the moral truth of the created order, their message gained a strength (the force of truth) which caused the lies of the existing social order to collapse. “The Truth,” said Christ, “will set you free” (John 8:31). Gandhi called our life “a long and arduous quest after Truth,” and this makes satyagraha compatible with Christianity. In Veritatis Splendor, Pope John Paul II says that we “are made holy by obedience to the truth,” an obedience which the Pope declares “is not always easy.” Pope John Paul II used the strategy of speaking truth boldly and in love when he peacefully confronted the communist rulers of his native Poland, and he has used it again in confronting the sexual revolution. His “theology of the body,” which George Weigel has called a “theological time-bomb” is based on the truth about human sexuality, the meaning that God gave it when He created human beings male and female. In Veritatis Splendor, the Pope explains that “man is constantly tempted to turn his gaze away from the living and true God in order to direct it towards idols (cf. 1 Thes 1:9), exchanging ‘the truth about God for a lie’ (Rom 1:25). Man’s capacity to know the truth is also darkened, and his will to submit to it is weakened. Thus, giving himself over to relativism and scepticism (cf. Jn 18:38), he goes off in search of an illusory freedom apart from truth itself.” Satyagraha is rooted in Truth; yet in Romans 1, the Scriptures’ most important passage about homosexuality, St. Paul says that humanity exchanged “the truth about God for a lie” and in that exchange, men and women turned from the true meaning of human sexuality, expressed in marriage, to a lie, expressed by women having sex with women and men having sex with men. Nor is the view that homosexual acts are “contrary to nature” (para phusin) limited to St. Paul. “One certainly should not fail to observe,” wrote Plato, “that when male unites with female for procreation the pleasure experienced is held to be due to nature, but contrary to nature (para phusin) when male mates with male or female with female” (Laws, 636C). Plato not only uses the same language as the Apostle; he also that such pleasure leads to slavery to sin: “those first guilty of such enormities [homosexual acts] were impelled by their slavery to pleasure” (Ibid). Yet Plato is, of all the major philosophers, probably most sympathetic to same-sex desire and same-sex love. When one analyzes Plato’s philosophy (as in the famous parable of the charioteer in the Phaedrus), one realizes that he argues for sexual restraint precisely so that authentic love can develop. Plato’s objection to homosexual activity is not that it undermines the family; he objects to homosexual activity because it corrupts chaste friendship. Instead of the “long and arduous quest after Truth,” envisioned by Gandhi, Mel White and others in Soulforce promote a skeptical attitude toward the Scriptures, asking (to paraphrase the Serpent in Eden) if God really forbade homosexual activity, and concluding, based on weak and superficial arguments, that Christians and Jews have completely misunderstood God’s plan for sexuality for more than thirty-five centuries. margin-left:0in'>One can see one way in which Soulforce downplays transcendent truth by comparing Soulforce vows with the vows Gandhi and King demanded of their followers. Gandhi insisted that his followers “must have a living faith in God.” King insisted that his followers “Meditate daily on the life and teachings of Jesus.” Soulforce, focusing on the human rather than the divine, asks its members to “meditate regularly on the life and teachings of Gandhi and King and other truth-seekers.” If the Soulforce leadership had really absorbed the lessons of Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr.’s search for truth, they would have called their followers to obey the Greatest Commandment: love God. See Also:
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