The Spectrum Blog

The director on For the Bible Tells Me So

By Alexander Carpenter

On the intersection of religion and homosexuality, For the Bible Tells Me So (2007) director Daniel Karslake, discusses his documentary.

Does the Bible Condemn Homosexuality? A look at the film For The Bible Tells Me So

By Daneen Akers, Spectrum Reviews Editor

Trailer for the new documentary For The Bible Tells Me So

My first encounter with For The Bible Tells Me So, a new documentary about homosexuality and the Bible, was at the Sundance Film Festival earlier this year. My husband and I had taken a group of students to the festival, and we waited in line for three hours hoping to get into a midnight screening. We got in, but just barely, sitting in the very front row of the theater, watching the film at an extreme angle. Even in the “worst” seats in the house, the film moved us all.

It was a bit of an odd paradigm. Here we were in the middle of a secular film festival, the crown jewel of an industry not exactly known for its overly kind portrayal of “religious folk,” and we were watching one of the most spiritual films any of us had ever seen. This film took religion and scripture seriously. This film didn’t want to simply toss out Christianity for its intolerance and storied past of scripturally-sanctioned abuse towards gays. This film wasn’t an angry screed. Instead it was a heartfelt and passionate plea for a new attitude, one in which gays didn’t have to deny themselves or their religion. This film proposed reconciliation, to bridge the chasm between what people often think their beloved Bible says—that gays are an “abomination”, and their children who don’t seem like abominations.

Early that morning after our students had kept us up for hours discussing the film (it was crystal clear to me how to keep our youth in the church after this wee-hours-of-the-morning conversation—address real issues honestly), I wrote a blog entry about my experience with this film for the Progressive Adventism site. The ensuing outpour of responses (from a wide variety of perspectives) made it clear to me that it’s not just college students who want to discuss this issue.  (To read that post with all 198 comments, click here)

After a second screening here in San Francisco (and a thorough read of Rev. Jack Rogers’ Jesus, the Bible, and Homosexuality: Explode the Myths, Heal the Church), I’m even more convinced that this is the issue of our time. The Bible has been used repeatedly throughout history to rationalize all sorts of oppression and injustice (slavery and the subjugation of women most recently), and now it’s being used again to excuse discrimination and intolerance against gays.

This issue is looming large in our society and our church. An Adventist LGBT advocate recently pointed out that a newly voted document “Safeguarding Mission in Changing Social Environments,” moves the church even further in its stance against gays and is now extending its condemnation towards those who advocate for homosexual rights. “The Church does not accept the idea of same-sex marriages nor does it condone homosexual practices or advocacy.”

To start (or for some of you continue) this important conversation, I’ve asked three people to review the film. David R. Larson is a Seventh-day Adventist minister and professor of Christian ethics at Loma Linda University; Obed Vasquez is a professor of sociology at Diablo Valley College in Pleasant Hill, CA and has been a member of SDA Kinship International since 1978; and Jacqueline Hegarty is a partnered Seventh-day Adventist lesbian mom living in the San Francisco Bay Area who is also a member of SDA Kinship.

To find a screening near you (and please do), visit  http://www.forthebibletellsmeso.org/screening.htm.

On homosexuality: Larson reviews For the Bible Tells Me So

By David R. Larson

Getting started too late, my wife and I sped the 51.8 miles from our condominium in Loma Linda to the Camelot Theater in Palm Springs. Things were going well until we got lost in that California oasis because our Internet directions told us to turn right when we should have turned left. When we finally arrived at our destination, the previews of coming attractions had begun to roll. But For Me the Bible Tells Me So had not yet started. We are happy that we did not miss a single frame!

I encourage as many as possible to see this movie during its preliminary screening. For locations and further information about where it is showing, please visit www.forthebibletellsmeso.org. If you cannot see it now, watch for it on the Sundance Channel and on DVD in early 2008. Buy it!  View it!  Discuss it!

Robert Greenbaum, one of movie’s executive producers, said in the question and answer period after the film screening that the film’s purpose is “to open up conversations” about those who say they wish their church loved them as much as they love it. These would be our gay and lesbian brothers and sisters in Christ.

I misspoke. This movie is not about them. It is about the rest of us. It is about how we straight—or pretending-to-be-straight—Christians often treat them. It is about why homosexual men and women commit suicide at three times the rate of others. It is about sin, not theirs but ours.

The film shows in a compelling way (those who know more about making movies can explain) a collage of snippets from the actual lives of at least five groups of people. These bits of film seem to have been thrown into a hat, stirred up and then pulled out and rearranged topically without a booming voice that proclaims, “Now we turn to the issue of …………..”  Everything just flows together in what I experienced as a zigzagging but smoothly running cinematic stream.

One of these groups is a small number of well-educated Christian homosexuals. As I now recall it, three are women, two are men. Four are white and one is black. Four of them are alive and well today. One is not. She was found dead, dangling in her home closet from a rope with a dog chain around her neck. She had kicked a chair out from under her.

The parents of these gay and straight people make up a second group. Those who use Scripture to make life miserable for homosexuals are a third. Others who read the Old and New Testament more responsibly constitute the fourth. The fifth is made up of animated characters that summarize recent scientific answers to the endless questions such as:  “Why are they like that?” Well, why are we like this?

I think it generous that those who produced For the Bible Tells Me So say nothing about the leading Christian gay bashers who have recently displayed their hypocrisy by being caught in homosexual activities themselves. In some deep way did they want to be discovered so as it bring their big lies to an end?  In their own fashion were they also “coming out of the closet?”  Is this why the movie spares them?  I don’t know but I do wonder.

For fear of dissuading some from seeing it, I hesitate to mention anything that I think this movie might have done more effectively; nevertheless, I hazard the following. First, I think it would have been helpful to have devoted more footage to thoughtful Christian leaders who are perplexed or even troubled by some things some homosexual men and women say and do. I understand that this movie’s producers tried but failed to find such people who were willing to be interviewed on camera. Only Richard Mouw, the president of Fuller Theological Seminary, agreed to be interviewed. Regrettably, as I know from my own attempts to get people involved in this topic, this is par for the course. No wonder most of those in this movie with more conservative views are unlettered and uncouth bigots!

I also think that this movie could have done more to emphasize that there is no such thing “as the homosexual life style” even though this expression has long been a menacing mantra. Just like straight people, gays and lesbians arranges their lives in many different ways. Many are healthy, others are deadly. To treat this subject by putting all heterosexuals in one moral category and all homosexuals in the opposite is false no matter which one we favor. The line between good and evil falls within us, not between.

A third issue is more strictly theological. The movie effectively shows how silly it can be to select some portions of Scripture and apply them to our own lives today without reference to their original contexts. But to some extent this still leaves unanswered the questions as to how we should pick and choose, as certainly we must.

I share the view that the life, teachings, death, resurrection and continuing ministry of Jesus Christ make up the criterion by which we should measure everything we find in Scripture and elsewhere. As Charles Scriven has written so well on this site and in Spectrum, we need to think of Scripture as a moving narrative with a discernable plot, one that moves to and from our Lord and Savior.

I like the language of “trajectory” because for me it connotes more strongly that this story advances into our time and beyond and that it does so in a certain direction, the one to which the ancient plot propels us!  Being a Christian today is not to do in our time what the ancients did in theirs. It is to continue the struggle. It is to go further in the same direction. It is to remember that “His truth keeps marching on!” and to get in step.

One way to do this is to see and discuss For the Bible Tells Me So!          

David R. Larson is a Seventh-day Adventist minister who has taught Christian ethics at Loma Linda University since 1974.  He, David Ferguson and Fritz Guy are editing a book titled "Christianity and Homosexuality:  Some Seventh-day Adventist Perspectives." It should be available by Christmas.

YOUR comments: On homosexuality

Since we have three posts for our "On homosexuality" section, I've closed the comments there and created this one thread to make it easier for you to comment after reading the reviews, watching the film or engaging in thoughtful reflection on what the Bible tells us. 

Film club: Citizen Kane

By Alexander Carpenter

I first saw Citizen Kane (1941) on break during my first year in college and was blown away by the nontraditional narrative technique and that rich Toland deep focus. And Orson Welles just commands the screen.

Film club: Battleship Potemkin

By Alexander Carpenter

The famous Odessa Steps sequence from the Sergei Eistenstein film Battleship Potemkin (1925). An early breakthrough in montage in cinema which is one of the reasons this footage is canonical in film history.

The soundtrack was created in 2005 by the Pet Shop Boys.

10 Minutes

By Alexander Carpenter

Now that's storytelling. Sarajevo. 1994. 

10 minuta (2002) by Bosnian director Ahmed Imamovic, winner of the 2002 Best European Film award at the Sarajevo Film Festival.

Remember: War is peace. 

Bonhoeffer: Truth to power

By Alexander Carpenter

At twenty-six years of age, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a German theologian delivers one of the first public criticisms of Hitler.

The German theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer was one of the first, and strongest, voices of resistance to Adolf Hitler. An acclaimed preacher, pacifist and author, Bonhoeffer came to the famed Abyssinian Baptist Church in Harlem on a teaching fellowship. When Bonhoeffer returned to Germany in 1932 he had a new awareness of racial prejudice and challenged Christian churches to stand with the Jews in their moment of need. Bonhoeffer eventually joined the unsuccessful plots to assassinate Hitler and was executed three weeks before the end of the war.

A clip from Martin Dobelmeier's documentary: Bonhoeffer. 

Memento mori and Ingmar Bergman

By Alexander Carpenter

The Seventh Seal (1957) four minute opening sequence.
"And when he had opened the seventh seal, there was silence in heaven about the space of half an hour" (Revelation 8:1)

The Country by Billy Collins

By Alexander Carpenter

Billy Collins, former US Poet Laureate and one of America's best-selling poets, reads his poem "The Country" with animation by Brady Baltezor of Radium.

I wondered about you
when you told me never to leave
a box of wooden, strike-anywhere matches
lying around the house because the mice

might get into them and start a fire.
But your face was absolutely straight
when you twisted the lid down on the round tin
where the matches, you said, are always stowed.

Who could sleep that night?
Who could whisk away the thought
of the one unlikely mouse
padding along a cold water pipe

behind the floral wallpaper
gripping a single wooden match
between the needles of his teeth?
Who could not see him rounding a corner,

the blue tip scratching against a rough-hewn beam,
the sudden flare, and the creature
for one bright, shining moment
suddenly thrust ahead of his time -

now a fire-starter, now a torchbearer
in a forgotten ritual, little brown druid
illuminating some ancient night.
Who could fail to notice,

lit up in the blazing insulation,
the tiny looks of wonderment on the faces of his fellow mice, onetime inhabitants
of what once was your house in the country?

The McPassion?

By Alexander Carpenter

Sometimes it is good to pause and reflect on the ways that commercialism and marketing exploits the kingdom of God.

Palm Sunday - Peace on Earth

Billionaires for war

By Alexander Carpenter

A meditation

Animation for a poem written and read by Billy Collins

Amazing grace in faith and politics

By Alexander Carpenter

I saw this film at a prescreening in Berkeley and I strongly recommend the moving experience to all my Adventist community members.

About the 18th century abolition work of parliamentarian William Wilberforce, the film captures the honorable struggle for justice that takes place when Christians use the power of their faith to change institutions. As blogger Brethren Priestess wrote after seeing the film:

It glamourizes political activism without obscuring the realities of the difficulties of the struggle. There is pain, there is hopelessness, there is self-doubt, there is loneliness, there is mistrust among the community. There are people saying ‘Go slower,’ ‘It’s bad for the economy,’ ‘People are too fearful for change,’ ‘You’ll be called a traitor,’ and, the most damaging of all, ‘Yes, I agree with you, but I don’t think yours is quite the right way to act, so I will work against you and support the status quo out of my own unoriginality.’
[snip]
The story also makes a great case for overcoming the typical division between political life and spiritual life. It shows convincingly that the best way to live as a Christian is to struggle to end injustice - that political activism is no less a Christian life than a life of solitude, and often an even ‘more’ Christian life, depending on the specific gifts of the Christian in question.

Today 27 million people continue to live as slaves. Many Christians are joining in a new campaign to end human trafficking in this generation. Learn more about the Amazing Change campaign.

Before you enlist

By Alexander Carpenter

Should this film be shown to every Adventist academy student?