Defense of Gomes: A Call for Christian Dialogue

To the Editors of The Crimson:

The United States is a religiously plural nation, and this is a plural university. Our community is home to a rich variety of religious traditions--among them, Buddhist, Christian, Jewish, Muslim and Hindu--along with various degrees of religious skepticism; and on certain questions of sexual morality, views differ sharply within and among those who are not religious. While we cannot, as a result, expect consensus on all these questions, it is part of the distinctive role of the university in our culture to represent a space within which a divergence of reasonable opinion on such on such matters is combined with active and intelligent dialogue. We writer to express our belief that the recent candle-light vigil on the steps of the University Church, directed against our friend and colleague, the Rev. Peter J. Gomes, while masquerading as an act of Christian charity, was in fact an ungenerous attempt to subvert exactly the sort of thoughtful dialogue that most people in all traditions desire.

We are all, ourselves, persons raised in Christian traditions. We are aware, as a result, as every educated person living in the United States is probably aware, that there is considerable diversity of opinion within the Christian tradition as to the status both of homosexual acts and of homosexual desires.

We confess that we ourselves do not regard such acts as intrinsically morally offensive. We confess that we do find it offensive to conceal an attack on a particular--in our view courageous, intelligent and generous-hearted--individual in an act of prayer.

We believe that the development of the self-understanding of the people of Christ in history has required a continual reexamination of Christian traditions. Just as most contemporary Christians have revisited the treatment of women (recognizing that St. Paul's requirement that women unconditionally obey their husbands and cover their heads in church reflected a particular cultural moment that has passed) and just as almost all Christians radically oppose St. Paul's tolerance for slavery, which was in keeping with his times, so, we believe, the very few observations in the Old and New Testaments that appear to condemn that what would now be called homosexual acts can be seen as reflecting prejudices inconsistent with the central Christians Message of compassionate brotherhood and sisterhood.

On such questions, however, we believe that thoughtful dialogue among Christians, indeed, among people of all faiths and no faith at all, is possible, indeed desirable. But we do not find evidence of the appropriate degree of careful and charitable consideration of the issues in the pronouncements and the writings of those who have chosen to attack Peter Gomes.

The remarks of some Concerned Christians notwithstanding, the view that homosexual acts are sinful has never been a central item of Christian doctrine: and that Professor Gomes has struggled with the issue and come to a different conclusion from theirs, far from disabling him as a leader of the University Church, demonstrates his capacity for moral leadership.

No one can surely think that a university with Harvard's honorable traditions should--or will--give in to the tactics of these "Concerned Christians." But their activities create an atmosphere at odds, in our view, both with the purposes of the University and with what is best in the Christian tradition. And so we urge Concerned Christians to reconsider their tactics and reenter into compassionate dialogue. K.A. Appiah   Henry Louis Gates, Jr.   Martin L. Kilson   Orlando Patterson..