Montreat College

Montreat is interesting because the college, the city, and a camp/retreat center are all located at the same place. In other words, this community is very, very small. We were happy that Montreat invited us on campus because it would have been very difficult finding public places where we could stand vigil.

I talked with a member of administration for much of the morning in the cafeteria, discussing with him the harmfulness of their policy. A few Montreat students contacted us prior to our visit and told us about the harassment they face and how said harassment goes unchecked and uninvestigated by administration. This troubled him. We were given “free reign” essentially over the campus, meaning we could go into any classrooms in any building. A student invited us to the art studio, so we went there and talked with some more students and looked at artwork. I met a student who is interested in doing Intelligent Design research, so we chatted about the legalities of such things in schools. I wrote a paper on ID for a class in Religion, Politics, and the Law, so I had some basic knowledge.

We then went to a presentation/forum, where the riders presented on something that we have all encountered—spiritual violence. Spiritual violence manifests itself in anti-gay rhetoric and ex-communication of Queer people from the church. Then, two professors from the college “responded” to our presentation. The response was not a response, however. One professor of theology had a 14-page paper that he read verbatim—not at all responding to what we had just discussed. In fact, this professor advocated for spiritual violence unapologetically. What is even more interesting as that he says he advocated a traditional Christian position, which supported the subjugation of women. Keep in mind, there is a lot of academic fluff, but the sexism and homophobia are blatant. Here are a few quotes from his paper.

“The Father and the Son share one nature, since the eternally begotten Son comes from the Father, just as the woman both shares the nature of the man and comes from him. And just as the woman is differentiated from the man by properties peculiar to her gender, so in the Trinity the Son is differentiated from the Father by a difference of properties. This mystery is what St. Paul alludes to in 1 Corinthians 11 when he says that, "the head of every man is Christ, the head of woman is man, and the head of Christ is God" (11:3). He says that man, "is the image and glory of God; but woman is the glory of man. For man is not from woman, but woman from man. Nor was man created for the woman, but woman for the man" (11:7-9).

Christ bears the same relation to God as the woman does to the man, in that the created order and dependence of the woman upon the headship of the man is an earthly image of the loving submission of the Son to the headship of the Father within the life of the Trinity. The woman was created to reflect the glory of the man just as the Son as the image of the invisible God reflects the glory of the Father. Central to Paul's argument in 1 Corinthians 11, based as it is upon the creation story, is that the very order of the life of the Trinity is to be reflected in the order of marriage, in which the man and the woman in their complementary roles image the loving headship and submission of the Father and the Son. For Christians, this is why Genesis 1:26 says, "Let us make man in our image."

Thus, the relationship between the genders constitutes an intentional pattern that is designed to reflect the love of the Trinity. You cannot take either gender out of that picture without distorting the divinely intended order inherent within humankind's image bearing role as male and female. It will not do to point out, as Mel White does, that this passage in Genesis says nothing about single persons or couples who do not have children. This is obviously because in the original man and woman we see a pattern for humankind as a whole. Childless couples and single persons, cannot constitute that pattern, for the simple reason that if they did the human race would only last one generation. But neither childless couples nor single persons disrupt the natural created ordering of the genders. Neither instance takes one of the genders out of the equation and replaces them with another, so they do not constitute analogous examples that can be used to support the practice of homosexual partnering."


And finally, he calls for the ex-communication of Queers who refuse to see the power and truth of the Holy Scripture:

“I cannot stress enough that the excommunication of any baptized person should only be put into effect after a process of loving and patient pastoral care, in the knowledge that all human beings fall short of the glory of God, in the hope that as she makes progress in the spiritual practices of prayer, Bible study, participation in worship and Eucharist, and the daily dying to self which is integral to Christian discipleship, she will come to acknowledge those points in her moral choices which are inconsistent with her identity in Christ, and her obligations as a member of the ecclesial family of God. The Church herself bears a heavy responsibility in this process. The only way practicing homosexuals will ever be brought to the point of accepting the Church's historic doctrine, to which all Christians are sacramentally committed through baptism, is if the theologians and pastors of the flock of God speak with a clear and consistent voice, and resist every temptation to conform the Church's moral teaching to the whims and deviant practices of the ethically bankrupt culture which surrounds us.”

By the end of his presentation, I was crying at his us of spiritual violence against my friends, my community, and me. It was doubly heart-breaking that he supported the view of women as less than. I could not stay in the room long after that, though many Equality Riders approached him to dialogue about his views. Our co-director, Jarrett, told him he was a Pharisee, which later made me smile. But, then I felt beaten and worn. It’s never the screaming, the sign holding, or the excessive police presence that tears me down. It’s the outright use of spiritual violence to make us feel less than that gets to me. It’s the untruth and the misuse of the Bible coupled with sexism and homophobia to produce a hate that stings.

We later went hiking up Lookout Mountain, which totally kicked my butt, but the exerting of energy made me feel much better. Looking out off the mountain to the city below left me with a peace that helped sustain me after the violent incident.



I made several friends and ate dinner with them at a local UU church, and felt overwhelmingly better by the end of the night.



Just today, we received word that a student met with the Dean of Students to discuss a policy change at Montreat. The administrator told her that he could foresee a change that only excludes homosexual sex acts, as to give it parity to heterosexual sex acts. The administrator said that sexual orientation could very well be added to the anti-harassment policy. So, despite the rather negative experience I had there, change is happening. And, if it takes me absorbing hate and spiritual violence to see these policies change, I will gladly do it for the rest of my life.