Black Gay Christians

In the current issue of the Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion , Richard Pitt of Vanderbilt examines the coping mechanisms used by black gay men within congregations that oppose homosexuality.  His abstract summarizes:

“Using interviews with black gay Christian men, I uncover a strategy used to maintain that identity in the face of stigmatizing religious rhetoric. While these men have managed to reconcile their religious and sexual identities, sermons delivered by church leaders disrupt that reconciliation, causing them to have to neutralize these anxiety-inducing attitudes. This study shows that they focus accusations of illegitimacy on the speaker rather than the doctrine by denigrating the speakers’ knowledge, morality, focus, and motivations. In this way, they neutralize the sting of churches’ negative messages by neutralizing the moral authority of the churches’ messengers. These findings offer new insight into how parishioners persist in religious communities in which their sexual behaviors or identities are condemned.

The article is, appropriately enough, called “Killing the Messenger.”  The strategy, of course, is not confined to homosexuals, but is a common, and deeply corrosive, maneuver of malcontents of all sorts.