Penelope Green’s recent New York Times obituary of Virginia Ramey Mollenkott is noteworthy to anyone who has followed churches’ long 20th-century debates about same-sex relationships and marriage. Mollenkott was far ahead of the curve in bringing a progressive, liberationist perspective to the evangelical Christian subculture.
The book “Is the Homosexual My Neighbor: Another Christian View”, which she wrote with Letha Scanzoni, was one of the central texts cited by The Other Side magazine and others on the sexual-revolution left.
As a video of Mollenkott’s address at Harvard Divinity School in 2002 shows, she was a captivating speaker, combining a native Philadelphian’s self-assurance with pleas to her sister feminists not simply to dismiss the Bible in their efforts to root out all traces of patriarchy.
Mollenkott stressed that wrestling with the contents of the Bible was key, along with the writing of John Milton, in her stepping away from the Plymouth Brethren theology in which she grew up.
If a reader leaves it there, it becomes easier to take the Times at its word that Mollenkott remained an “evangelical,” but in this case that would be to treat an adjective as a noun.
The Times links to a page on Mollenkott’s website in which the longtime professor and activist gave her own explanation of what she was “evangelical” about:
John Milton was a 17th century Puritan who loved Scripture. From studying his interpretive method, being challenged by feminist thinkers, and interpreting my dreams, I gradually began to trust my own experience. And I began to read the Bible with attention to literary formats, historical context, what words meant at the time the text was written, the use of imagery, analogy, symbol, and so forth. The text was transformed by these standard interpretive methods, and I in turn was radicalized by the Bible. I am now a member of the evangelical left, working with other Christian feminists toward a world in which all people are respected and cherished as made in God’s image, and in which the natural environment is respected and cherished as being created and sustained by one Great Spirit. I guess you could call me and Evangelical Universalist.
Elsewhere on the site, Mollenkott wrote about how the New Thought text “A Course in Miracles” — beloved source document of former presidential candidate Marianne Williamson’s career — “transformed my life.”
What I would really enjoy is interacting with people online who are willing to think about Course principles and discuss them in depth. Including the resistance they may feel to some of these principles. Take, for instance, the basic premises of A Course in Miracles: “Nothing real can be threatened. Nothing unreal exists. Herein lies the peace of God.” How does that statement sound to you in our post-Holocaust, violent world? Clearly it implies that the world of time and space, and our separate bodies, are not ultimately real, so that nothing can harm the reality of our internal selves.
One other detail in the obituary is troubling in its shallow evidence. Here is how Green summarizes a letter by Bob Jones III to a third party, but as described by Mollenkott: “He described her as a devil for ‘writing favorably about lesbianism’ and said that he believed ‘it would not be unfit to pray for her destruction.’ ” Mollenkott was a 1953 graduate of BJU, a center of fundamentalist Protestant culture.
In typical pop journalism fashion, some summaries of the story inflated one man’s letter into a malevolent prayer movement of unspecified size: “Prominent Christian evangelicals prayed for her destruction, while others say Virginia Ramey Mollenkott saved their lives.”
The closest we have to proof of this rhetorical blast is Mollenkott’s testimony, as published on the advocacy website BJUnity weblog:
Some years ago, a person who had read my books wrote to BJU to ask whether I had actually graduated from there. The answer, on the cohey are praying that God will “destroy” me. So it should come as no surprise that I strongly resonate with Jeffrey Hoffman’s emphasis that we need to work at getting the Religious Right to tone down its rhetoric concerning LGBT people.
Devil, demon, what’s the difference, right?
Some details are bound to shift when a horror story depends on the sole storykeeper’s memory.
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