Biblical comfort for gay Christians

Conflicted families find acceptance at the Nexus Church.

Staff photo by Richard O Jones The Rev. Mike Underhill, pastor of the Nexus Church, says that being a gay Christian is not an oxymoron.

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By Richard O Jones, Staff Writer 1:40 AM Sunday, July 31, 2011

FAIRFIELD TWP. — Janice Robinson is a dental hygienist and for a time worked at a dental office in the Cincinnati neighborhood of Hyde Park.

For reasons she could never quite fathom, she seemed to have a following of gay patients who would ask for her specifically when they made their appointments. Some of them would bring her cookies and other treats, and though she brought them home to her family, she wouldn’t eat them herself because, she said, they had “gay cooties.”

“I was ‘Miss Pompous’,” she says now. “I believed that anyone outside my tunnel-vision is not a good person, and I associate my anti-gay feelings with my religious upbringing. I just grew up that way.”

Robinson was raised Catholic, she said, and was “born again” in her 20s. Since then, she’s attended Nazarene, Methodist and Vineyard churches, but none of them helped her broaden her world view, she said.

So eight years ago, when her son Carl Schottmiller came out as a gay man during his senior year of high school, that world view was set askew, and it’s taken her a long time to come around.

“I cried for three months,” she said. “When I told my sister, she scoffed. ‘We knew since he was 5 years old,’ she said.

“So it was OK with my family. With my Christian friends, not so much. I only heard my son would burn in hell for his homosexuality.”

Schottmiller, now 26, said the conflict between Christianity and homosexuality drove him away from the church entirely.

“I am not a part of any organized religion,” he said in a telephone interview from California, where he is working toward a Ph.D. in culture and performance. “I would describe myself as a Christian, but a lot of Christians don’t feel that gay people can be a part of that.”

The controversy over the role of gays and lesbians in the church continues, as many Christians regard the lifestyle as sinful. But in recent years, some churches, such as the Presbyterian Church U.S.A., have changed their stance on homosexuality, allowing for gay and lesbian candidates to be ordained and supporting same-sex marriage. Eight years ago, the Episcopal Church selected its first openly gay bishop.

Schottmiller said that going through puberty, when he began to be aware of his sexual orientation, the things he was being taught went against what he was feeling.

“When I realized I was queer, there was a real conflict of interest there,” he said. “At the time, I pulled away from church because all I saw from the Christian perspective was there was no exceptions, just condemnation and judgment. I felt that it was impossible to be queer and a churchgoing Christian, so I pulled away.”

Robinson said that it took her three or four years to start accepting that her son was gay. She quit her job for a while to go back to school to get a degree in humanities to help her understand.

“I wrote a paper on things not to do when your child comes out,” she said, “since I did them all — even trying to have him brainwashed back to heterosexuality.

“I had a lot of guilt (when he came out) because I thought I made him gay because we did so much stuff together,” she said. “He was smart enough to recognize (my conflicts). He went down through the list of things he knew I would beat myself up over.

“He said he was afraid I wouldn’t love him because I was the most homophobic person he knew,” she said. “After three or four years, I started getting over it and became very proud of my son for becoming who he is.”

But the conflict between Robinson’s Christian faith and her son’s sexual orientation still gnawed at her.

Then, “Three months ago, I was reading the newspaper and saw a blurb about a symposium on ‘Homosexuality and the Bible,’ and thought I should take that because that was my whole dilemma,” she said.

That seminar was led by the Rev. Mike Underhill, pastor of the Nexus Church, which happened to meet just down the road a little from Robinson’s home in the East Butler YMCA, and eventually she started attending there, but it was the symposium that finally allowed her to reconcile her faith with her son’s sexual orientation.

Underhill was raised in the Methodist church, the son of a pastor, in Memphis, Tenn. When he was a young man in the 1960s, however, he pulled away from the church because he felt that Christianity was a conspirator in many of society’s ills.

“During the Vietnam and civil rights era, I saw at the time the church was part of the problem, not the solution,” he said. “They weren’t doing anything to change the situation.”

So he entered the corporate arena, and retired in his early 50s from Amoco, now part of BP, where he was the manager of global diversity.

“I had a wonderful job because I had a secular pulpit to speak about discrimination in the workplace,” he said. “I helped change some policies and made life better for a lot of people.”

After he retired, he finally answered the nagging call to the religious pulpit. Being an openly gay man, he was ordained into the United Church of Christ, a relatively new denomination made from “a lot of old German congregations coming together.”

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