"The Spiritual Significance of Pride"

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Last night's Seattle Storm game against the Indiana Fever was an "unofficial Pride Night" as described by Seattle Times reporter Jayda Evans.

Although I confess that I'm usually spending the breaks in action to write out notes or run through statistics instead of paying attention to the on-court activities, it seemed as though they kept last night's occasion rather subtle. If I recall correctly, it was mentioned once during a timeout but not explicitly beyond that.

However, while in-game activities were subtle, the Storm's engagement with the weekend's Pride activities was not -- Storm co-owner Anne Levinson helped raise the Pride Flag to the top of the iconic Space Needle to help kick off Pride Weekend in Seattle.

When I got home from what was arguably the best 40 mins of basketball from two teams that I've seen in a long time, I stayed up a while to write things up and just simply calm down enough to go to sleep. At some point in the wee hours of the morning, I came across an article entitled, "The Spiritual Significance of Pride" by Rev. Patrick S. Cheng.

Although it was quite late, I was intrigued partially because of discussions I've had with people recently about whether the WNBA's Faith Nights risk alienating the league's LGBT (and mostly the "L" part of the acroynm) fanbase. The assumption behind such claims is that Christianity defines homosexuality as a sin. Yet although some people do interpret the Bible in that way, there is no universal agreement on that interpretation. Quite to the contrary, in cities like Seattle or Berkeley there are plenty of people who exist both in the LGBT and Christian communities as well as "LGBT-friendly" churches. Once we distinguish the difference between the doctrine and self-serving interpretations of the doctrine, the entire notion that these two things can't fit because they don't always fit currently is exposed as false.

So I found it interesting for Rev. Cheng to describe the significance of leagues like the WNBA having Pride Nights in explicitly spiritual terms. The following excerpt caught my eye (click here for the full article).

In other words, sin is not just a matter of lifting oneself up too high (as in the case of Satan, the rebellious angels, or Adam and Eve), but it is also a matter of failing to lift oneself up high enough. Many LGBT people have been taught to hide in the shadows as a result of being taunted and tormented by our peers from an early age. We are constantly told that what we do is unnatural and that God hates us. Is it any wonder, then, that so many LGBT people suffer from a toxic degree of self-hate and shame?

Even those of us who have been out for decades and who deal with LGBT issues on a daily basis in our jobs ("professional gays," as one of my friends put it) are not immune to shame. For example,even though my partner and I have been together for nearly 19 years we still feel self-conscious when we hold hands or kiss each other in certain public situations. We have been programmed (wrongly) to believe that these acts are somehow less meaningful in the eyes of God than the exact same acts performed by an opposite-sex couple.

Indeed, feminist Christian theologians going back to Valerie Saiving in the early 1960s have characterized self-hate and shame -- as opposed to pride -- as the kind of sin that is most often experienced by women and LGBT people. According to such theologians, elevated self-hate and shame is sinful because we fail to recognize how God has lifted up all of humanity through the resurrection of Jesus Christ, and we therefore fail to live our lives in accordance with this good news.

First, the reason I like the article in its entirety is that it makes a compelling argument that a) homosexuality is not a sin and b) that LGBT Pride is not a sin. But second, I like the way he's found an intersection and point of dialogue between the often polarizing "faith" and "sexuality" camps -- by my read, he has leveraged the concept of Pride Month to help us better understand the Christian concept of sin and the value of pride for historically oppressed groups.

What strikes me then is that the answer to these dilemmas we often argue about is often not to walk away, shut our doors, and hold on to our arbitrary and myopic beliefs about the opposing side. Instead, it would seem that we probably need to find more spaces for substantive dialogue. Which leads directly to the cultural significance of Pride Nights and open support of the LGBT community as shown by Levinson and the Storm: the more public spaces we have in this society in which we attempt to lift up "all of humanity" the easier it will be to engage in the type of dialogue and action that will help us get beyond false and antiquated judgments of one another based in problematic interpretations of "right" and "wrong".

Hiding from the things that potentially divide us is only a path to further division. By confronting them and lifting up ourselves with others instead of opposition to others, we may also inspire someone else to seek the spaces and communities they need to lift themselves up. What I think Cheng demonstraes is that regardless of whether you're religious, there are some fundamental things that we all share as human beings. One of those things is self-respect and respect -- not merely tolerance -- for others' differences. Even if it's just an unofficial theme night at a relatively niche sporting event, the cultural and even political value could be far greater in the long run.

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