LGBTQ Find Unexpected Hope in Interfaith

Following Monday’s guest post, “The Gay Divide,” I’m excited to bring you yet another perspective on queer issues and interfaith work. Today’s post for our ongoing series of guest contributors comes from Robert Chlala, a Campus Engagement Associate with the Interfaith Youth Core. Written in advance of the recent IFYC Interfaith Leadership Institutes, it is an important and timely message on the importance of LGBTQ participation in interfaith work. As a queer interfaith advocate, Robert’s message resonates deeply with me. I hope it will with you, too. As Robert shows, not only does it get better, but we’re “better together.” Without further ado:

News had recently broke about the suicide of yet another LGBTQ youth in the U.S., the latest in a rash that has brought to light the exclusion and violence that continues to plague those marked “different.”

Speaking to a top conservative leader and member of the Young Republicans on her campus, Lily Connor calmly relayed her story of how she has worked to create a space for interfaith dialogue in the social justice campaigns she leads. She pauses for him to share his experiences, but he is unsure where he fits in. As she guides him he lights up as he realizes that he too has a story: that he is living interfaith cooperation in that very moment.

This could be your typical story of a growing interfaith student movement, one that we hear at Interfaith Youth Core almost daily. But I’m leaving out a few important details:

• Lily is transgender, and the leader of Feminist Voices and several other campus action groups.
• The campus is Southwestern University, located in the small, conservative commuter town of Georgetown, Texas.

In the face of a more-than-uphill struggle, Lily could have stayed home that day and forgotten she had ever heard the word “interfaith.” She could have chosen not to brave the possibility of awkward glances, retreated from trying to give LGTBQ people a voice in growing social movements.

Instead, as Lily explained in her application to IFYC’s Interfaith Leadership Institute in Washington, DC – which she will attend this weekend with some 300-some college students, faculty and staff from across the country – she knew she could not just stay home. She wrote, “My faith informs the social work I engage in, just as other people’s religious or secular values inform theirs… In short, social justice and interfaith cooperation need each other.”

So she came to the table.

As did the several members of Auburn University’s LGBTQ organization, who worked with with two dozen multicultural and faith-based student leaders on a beautiful fall Sunday last month to understand how interfaith cooperation is integral to all their efforts at the Alabama public university.

As did Ted Lewis, the Assistant Director for Sexual and Gender diversity at University of North Carolina – Charlotte, who participated in an intensive interfaith workshop we held last Friday. Glowing, he shared how he was inspired by several local churches’ efforts to build bridges with LGBTQ communities.

Ted and his fellow staff, listening to the stories of young students from across the South that IFYC has encountered in the last few months, beamed with the understanding that the interfaith movement isn’t just something that happens in remote big cities up North or on the West Coast. It is already happening in neighborhoods and on campuses a stone’s throw away.

At a time when perhaps we have never needed it more, this growing movement is creating a space for young people – from Kentucky to California – to articulate their values and truly come as they are, towards creating a better world.

This weekend, hundreds of these dedicated college students and faculty, of all religions, ethnic and racial backgrounds, sexual orientations, and gender identities, will gather to take this vision to the next level.

As part of IFYC’s Interfaith Leadership Institute, they will gain tools to take interfaith cooperation home to their campuses, towards tackling some of the most pressing social issues of our time. As part of the Better Together campaign kicking off this fall, they will change the conversation on faith and values.

What they may not realize is that – by sitting in the room together – they are already moving the course of history. They will confront their fears and prejudices. They will ask questions they were long afraid to confront.

And they will understand that they are poised to overcome the verbal and physical violence that drive young people to hopelessness, to defeat the virulent xenophobia and intolerance that colored this last summer, and to build a world where we are truly better together.

This post originally appeared on the Washington Post Faith Divide.

Robert Chlala is a Campus Engagement Associate with the Interfaith Youth Core and a freelance writer. Over the last 10 years, he has helped lead numerous social change organizations, such as the California Fund for Youth Organizing , which have been rooted in the power of young people to radically impact issues such as immigration, media, human rights, and education. Interfaith engagement has been a core of this work: he has seen first-hand how youth working around shared values have transformed his home communities in Los Angeles and Northern California – and are creating a better world around the U.S. He is also a practicing Nichiren Buddhist and active with the local Soka Gakkai International chapter.

An Empirical Quest to Discover… Feelings and Emotions

Today’s entry in our ongoing series of guest contributors comes from Bryan Brown, a NonProphet Status reader and undergraduate senior at the University of Rochester. Bryan writes about his journey as a secular humanist and how his understanding of religion has changed over time. Without furter ado, take it away Bryan!

I wasn’t always the sweet and sensitive secular humanist I am today. I used to see the world through very blunt scientific truths. During my personal journey, I have learned how atheism alone does not define a person’s way of viewing — or being a part of — the world in which he or she lives.

A pivotal time in my adolescence was the winter of my sophomore year of high school, during which I went through a bout of depression. In hindsight, it was probably caused in part by lack of sunlight, my first AP class, and raging hormones.

I kept encountering questions of “why” — questions about my source of motivation — and found my lack of faith to be a bump in the road. How could I justify putting so much energy into something that had no concrete, apparent meaning?

And so one cold afternoon in February, I sat down and created a Word document, titling it simply as “The Philosophy.”  My goal was to justify life’s meaning, scientifically and rationally, without the use of religion. What I produced was a six-page document that, at the time, seemed satiating. I supported my arguments with scientific principles (within the limitations of my high school curriculum, of course); in a way you could compare it to the Three Laws found in Asimov’s I, Robot collection. What I really did was use deductive reasoning to rationalize an end to my depression.

At the time I felt more confident than ever about my beliefs.  I hoped that by aligning my actions with this self-made mould of rationality, I could approach any life problem — academics, friendships, girlfriends — without flaw.

Looking back, I now realize what “The Philosophy” really was. Believing that I had a potent understanding of my universe made me feel powerful and in-control. However, in many social situations, my methods proved unsuccessful. It had become my defense mechanism — my excuse to not regard myself as an emotional human. What initially appeared to be the elegant simplicity of “The Philosophy” ultimately proved to be a blunt instrument. It could easily encourage behavior that was insensitive and self-serving, putting my rationalized life goals above all else.

I think I was afraid that relying on emotional responses was as faith-based as relying on a deity, and therefore reckless. I found myself identifying with a certain archetype of personality found in T.V. and literature; I felt that I was channeling Dr. House from House, Bones from Bones, and even Dr. Manhattan from The Watchmen.

My education at the University of Rochester helped balance all of that out, both in and out of the classroom. When I learned about Freud’s concept of id and ego, it helped me reconceptualize my thoughts on prioritizing conscious reasoning over subconscious urges. My study of anthropology taught me about attention to detail, as well as the exercise of treating one’s own culture as an alien one; it was all that talk about being truly “ethnographic.” I even took a religion course, which helped me analyze religions in an anthropological and non-judgmental way.

Meanwhile, I went through a smattering of social and romantic relationships of all shapes and sizes. Declaring love for somebody scared me for some time; it seemed like a leap of blind faith that was only meant for the religious. My “Philosophy” attempted to define love as something that occurred “when a single stimulus or source becomes associated — consciously and subconsciously — with powerful, positive, simultaneous combinations of synergistically acting viscerogenic and psychogenic responses.”

But in the end it was my actual life experiences that reshaped my secular beliefs, and therefore my entire psychological way of being, into a new and different person. And so during my junior year, as I sat in the on-campus Starbucks among all the caffeine addicts and intellectuals, I felt compelled to open a new Word document.

I poured my thoughts onto the page, combining old truths with my new wisdom, which helped make the whole thing more, well, human-friendly. One of the most important epiphanies I have had is that no matter how much we rationalize the workings of the universe, at the end of our pondering we must reintegrate our ideas into our human culture and experience them.

Would a sunset be less beautiful just because you understood the physics behind its colors? I’d venture that for some this makes the sunset even more intriguing! As for emotions, feelings and the subconscious, they have a place, too. Even if you don’t believe in a soul, and you recognize that all of your emotions are just cocktails of electrochemical signals within your body, you can still appreciate their function in your life. I believe Carl Jung tackles this subject nicely in his work The Shadow, in which he says that the parts of our subconscious that we are sometimes ashamed of must be embraced and transcended, rather than defeated.

Finally, I changed the way I look at religion, as well as atheism. Anthropologically, it is easy to agree that religion, for many people, serves several functions that are integral for a social human world. These include community, tradition, guidance, emotional support, motivation, social activities, networking, and meaning. When I think about it this way, it is easy for me to look “ethnographically” at the religious, and see the ways in which the peaceful theists, especially those engaged in interfaith discourse, can get along fine and do plenty of good in the world.

Meanwhile, I realized that what I want to see most from the secular population is proof that we too can provide community, support and values for one other, rather than spend all of our time criticizing the religions of the world. And so it is from my personal journey and these realizations that I am not only a self-declared atheist; I also have a reason to live, love, and be part of something bigger than myself.

Bryan Brown is an undergraduate senior at the University of Rochester. As a member of the Rochester Early Medical Scholars Program, he will continue on to the U of R School of Medicine next year. Outside of the classroom, Bryan is also a passionate mandolinist, saxophonist, performer, and composer. While he was raised in a Jewish home, Bryan has been a self-declared atheist for years and has more recently taken a greater interest in secular humanist ideals.