The Rev. Otis Gaddis III leads Out in the Church, a sexuality and spirituality discussion group, on Monday nights in the Memorial Chapel. Gaddis hopes to help LGBT students become more comfortable with their sexuality in religious settings.
While the LGBT community is starting to become more accepted in some Christian circles, many are hoping the religious environment will progress beyond acceptance to full embrace.
The Rev. Otis Gaddis III is the Episcopal and Anglican chaplain at the Memorial Chapel. He is also gay. Though he personally has not experienced any intolerance at this university, he said he realizes some of the programs he leads conflict with many of his colleagues’ ideologies.
Gaddis runs Out in the Church, a sexuality and spirituality discussion group that meets Monday nights in the chapel. Students in the LGBT community often struggle to reconcile their sexuality with their religion if their religion teaches that homosexuality is wrong, he said.
“It used to be that you could say, in the conservative Christian world, that being gay was horrible,” Gaddis said. “But now you can’t do that, you have to say that you respect gay people while you also think they’re wrong.”
Jeff Simpson, an intern at campus Christian group Cru, said that while he believes homosexuality is wrong, Christians should love and accept gay people.
“The church has a lot to apologize for in terms of the way they’ve treated homosexuals,” he said. “On the other hand, the Bible does take sexuality seriously.”
Simply saying that Christian groups should welcome gay people is not enough, Gaddis said. There needs to be a realization in the religious community that there is nothing wrong with homosexuality, he said.
Darcy Sessions, a 53-year-old sociology major, was raised as a Jehovah’s Witness and struggled to embrace her sexuality for most of her life.
“I had to move through my own homophobia,” she said. “I’ve worked on it for years, but sometimes it will still rise up from the unconscious.”
After coming out as a teenager, Sessions was disfellowed from her religious organization and had to leave home when her parents refused to accept her.
But Sessions said she was not willing to give up her spirituality. She found a way to move past the hostility and have her beliefs coexist with her sexuality, she said, but growing up learning that homosexuality is a sin was a painful experience.
“It’s like someone telling you your eye color is wrong,” she said. “We want to worship, we want to celebrate, we want to be part of it and we’re everywhere. To deny that causes deep harm to the human psyche.”
Some Christian groups are unwilling to change their views on homosexuality because they deny there may be more than one way to interpret the Bible in the modern world, Gaddis said. And to say that being gay is wrong is to be stuck in the past, Sessions said.
“The old ways of theology have to come to an end; we need to adapt and embrace,” she said. “In 100 years, students are going to look at this time in the history books and think ‘How could that be?’”
But not all agree that adapting Christian views are the way of the future. The Bible is clear that homosexuality isn’t right, and that isn’t going to change anytime soon, said Jessica Senasack, Baptist chaplain at the Memorial Chapel.
“Even though certain people don’t like what we have to say, I can’t take away from what my holy book says,” she said. “It’s important to understand we don’t agree that homosexuality is the right way to live your life, but we also don’t think it makes you a horrible person.”
Sessions said she has hope that religious groups will continue to become more progressive about these issues in the future.
“Gays and lesbians won’t go away; we’ve been here since the beginning of time,” she said. “What will go away is the fear and the need to change us.”
