Thoughts on Orlando, from the pews.

There is a general rule that one should wait a week to analyse a tragedy. If one has the rare eloquence of Alex Massie, or, like Andrew Mitchell, the personal knowledge to re-vivify a dead friend in tribute, there may be exceptions. But in these first few days, fragments of evidence bubble to the surface until they drift or sink again, and each will be seized in turn by those who would construct an exclusive narrative.

 

Was the brilliant Jo Cox another victim of far right terror, of militant nationalism uncorked by demagogic politics, of poorly monitored mentally illness, cultural violence against women, or the inherent risks of democracy? It seems that the answer may lie in all five and more. But a suspect has now been charged, and we can only hope that a public trial provides, not more division, but a real process of justice and scrutiny.

 

So that’s why this isn’t a post about Jo Cox. It’s about Orlando, which is a tragedy we remember today, one week on. Which means, of course, it’s entirely about Jo Cox.

 

Tonight, I’m going to church. It’s something I try to do most Sundays, often failing. (Evensong can be a better bet than a 9.30 dash to morning communion.) But as my friends know, I am a member of the Church of England. And that Church matters to me – it’s how, growing up, I experienced real community; it’s a world in which I follow the gossip and politics; it’s the basis on which I wrestle with a sustaining, flickering faith. My mother chose to take us, growing up, to a church in which we learnt that not everyone was white and not everyone was wealthy. That church, where diverse families prayed and played together, was the Church at its best.

 

So I was glad that one of my local churches, St Mary Abbots, opened its doors this week for any passer-by who wished to light a candle for the 49 victims of last Sunday’s shooting in Orlando. Meanwhile we asked ourselves questions about a world which could let this happen, just as we ask questions about how Jo Cox came to die. But as we demand that politicians examine the language of English nationalism, that western Muslims examine the language of homophobia, those of us who sit in the pews this Sunday must ask ourselves some questions too.

 

What we now know about Omar Mateen, who killed 49 people in Florida last Sunday, is that he was a profoundly conflicted man with homosexual urges raised in an exceptionally bizarre religious home. In this case, the faith was Islam, although the Islam of a father whose Facebook video loyalties changed with ethno-religious winds and whose son to claim links to groups as diametrically opposed as the Shia Hezbollah and Sunni al-Qaeda. And like so many unhappy white men across America’s Bible Belt, Omar appears to have known that coming out could cost him his father’s pride. If his wife’s account is to be believed – she’s heavy on the limp-wristed stereotype – Omar’s father had angrily accused him of being gay in past rows; what we do know is that in a response to last weekend’s news, Seddique Mateen issued a video apologising for his son, on the grounds that it is for God, not man, to publish the ‘hamjensbazi’ (a derogatory term for gay people.)

 

The political left and right have responded to these drips of detail through their own specific blinkers. The right in this country, as much as the acolytes of Donald Trump, have insisted on viewing Mateen’s massacre solely through the lens of Islamic terrorism. Trump’s own claim “to stand for” LGBT people is up there with wife-beaters who suddenly start to care about violence against women once ‘Islamic’ female genital mutilation is mentioned.

 

The left, as others have pointed out, seem paralysed by the problem of Islamic sexual conservatism: on the victim pyramid, does the orthodox Muslim Imam who’s unfairly hassled at border control rank higher or lower than a gay man he condemns to hell? Commentators on the American left have been particularly keen to point that most of Mateen’s victims were Hispanic gay man. In a movement that groups both together as ‘people of colour’, the message too often is that it’s insulting to Hispanic gay men to talk about homophobia amongst Pashtun men.

 

Above all, both sides obsessively accuse each other of erasing gay Muslim voices: the left in the desperate hunt to prove that ‘Islam’, that well-known monolith, is just fine with gay people; the right, conversely, in an attempt to prove that it’s not. Meanwhile, the actual stories of gay Muslims, from a pseudonymous Afghan lesbian who knew the Mateen family, to Omar Aziz, who heard the news while at a nightclub himself, attest that there’s progress and pain, but usually a long way to go.

 

The LGBT community, of course, are used to physical threat, and to internalised homophobia. The long list of killers of gay men, from John Wayne Gacy to Jeffery Dahmer, is littered with white men whose troubled families read like a Mateen parenting playbook. And as we know, many of them were raised as evangelical Christians.

 

This weekend, the Right Reverend Paul Bayes, Bishop of Liverpool, will publish an essay acknowledging the “harsh fact is that the church has played, and still plays, no small part in [the] bruising and breaking” LGBT people, including in his own evangelical wing. Those of us who call ourselves Christians should join him. Church teaching will always argue for sexual self-control but, to paraphrase two thousand years of theological disagreement, it is no longer enough to “agree to disagree” on whether same-sex love can be sacredly consummated. And it is not enough to talk about being ‘from a different wing of the church’, as woolly liberals like myself so often do, while evangelicals fund and fuel anti-gay lynch mobs in Uganda. It’s not just Uganda. As the Church of England declines, it becomes more reliant on the influx of American-influenced evangelical movements like Alpha or New Wine. What of the gay young man who grows up in such a Church of England?

 

Some of the bravest people I know are gay Christians, like the Catholic writer Eve Tushnet, who believe that God has called them to withstand sexual temptations, just as He calls other people to overcome a unusually short temper or a tendency towards pride. (The theology of the Islamic writer Yasir Qadhi, unpleasantly littered as it is with admonitions that women should stay in seclusion, is not that different.) There’s something deeply admirable about men and women who recognise, in the modern world, that self-denial is a path to sanctity. But the tone of charity which marks Tushnet’s writing is rarely present in the pulpits of western megachurches. If homosexuality is a temptation treated by the church like pride or anger, few young people seem to take their own lives after hearing a thunderous sermon against pride.

 

Is there a qualitative difference between Islamic gay-bashing and white Christian gay-bashing, the ways troubled young men of each background take out their hate? Perhaps.  One answer lies in geography. Traditionally, the most dangerous place for an urban American gay man is when he visits his home town. The same holds true in Britain. Last year’s report by the University of Leicester’s Centre for Hate Studies focused specifically on rural communities, discovering that 88% of LGBT people had been emotionally or physically scarred by harassment, but that only 14% reported their most recent incident to police, for fear of being outed by local officers or nosy neighbours. Gay-bashing by whites strongly correlates to towns with high levels of deprivation – consider the 57 seaside towns analysed by the ONS in 2013.

 

White families raised in cities tend to be more liberal than their rural counterparts. But that doesn’t hold for non-white families, particularly first generation immigrants, not least because fewer immigrants live in rural areas at all. Wherever their grandfathers grew up, British Muslims and black British Christians (who now make up the backbone of British Christianity) tend live in cities or suburbs. And there’s nothing to fuel sexual safe-hate like watching gay men and women enjoy themselves from the window of a home where everything’s forbidden.

 

Consider Omar Mateen, across the sea in Florida. Some of his father’s views would have been perfectly at home in Laramie, Wyoming. Instead, he grew up in Fort Pierce, a suburban commuter-accessible town (by sprawling US standards) between the fun-loving metropolises of Orlando and Miami. His access to Orlando’s gay clubs became easy – and then, in a spiral of loathing, he took a military-grade gun and killed the very men he’d tried to seduce. Perhaps the real clash of civilizations is not between Islam and the West. It’s between the values of the city and the village.

 

None of that precludes the probability that Mateen was taught how to channel that self-hate through Islamist radicalisation online.  The right may argue that specific radicalisation is not a trap which faces troubled white Christians, who lack the ethno-nationalist ties to ISIS’ politics, or black British evangelicals, for whom Christianity is often core to family identity. But death cults prey on all the mentally vulnerable, a point we should bear in mind as more emerges about the affiliations of Jo Cox’s killer.

 

We are all messes of motivations – products of culture, politics and brain chemistry. So why should that not be true of the killers amongst us? As Alex Massie wrote this week, “we can’t control the weather, but we can change the political climate in which the weather happens.” In the case of Jo Cox, that may mean confronting the viciousness of a stirring British fascism. In the case of Omar Mateen, it means we need to talk, without embarrassment, about the specific pressures facing young Muslim men in our cities. But it also means that believers of all faiths, including Christians, need to think frankly about how we teach our boys to be men.