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Following the Club Q shooting on Saturday, a poem that Jay Hulme wrote and published in October 2021 began to circulate on the internet as an homage to the dead and a slap at those who are troubled, not by homosexuality, but by the cultural agenda the left is advancing under the LGBTQ+ rubric. Poetically, Hulme’s effort is undistinguished, but it’s the perfect microcosm of leftist faith, which requires that, rather than bending our morality to the Bible, the Bible must be recast to bow to leftist social norms.
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Hulme is the “Poet-in-Resident at ‘The Poet’s Church,’ St Giles-in-the-fields in Central London.’ St. Giles is a functioning church. Indeed, rather endearingly, Hulme is a fan of churches and has several photos of churches she admires “because every church is loved by those who worship there.”
But what, specifically, does Hulme admire in the Christian faith? Were I to ask my Christian friends, they would probably point first to John 3:16, which states “For God so loved the world, that He gave His only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in Him should not perish, but have everlasting life.”
I think that they would also add that their faith demands of them the same code of ethics or morality that guided Jesus in his life: Namely, the Ten Commandments, Jewish sexual teachings (monogamous sexuality), and Jesus’s own teachings, all of which are concerned with man’s relationship to God, to society (“Caesar”), and to his fellow man. It is an aspirational faith, intended to raise mankind up.
Image: Jesus healing the bleeding woman, seen in the Catacombs of Marcellinus and Peter.
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The Hulme poem I’ve seen circulating amongst leftists, though, has a different message—namely, that Jesus exists to conform to mankind or, rather, to a specific view of human sexuality. The poem is entitled “Jesus at the Gay Bar.” It describes Jesus spinning around on the dance floor with his robe pulled above his knees. A boy touches the hem of Jesus’s robe, asking to be healed so that he becomes different from what he is. A sweaty Jesus refuses this request, instead saying to the boy that he’s perfect as he is.
In her commentary, Holme explains that she’s reconfiguring Mark 5:25-34. In that verse, a woman stricken with over a decade of bleeding has such great faith in Jesus that she believes just touching his robe will heal her…and it does. Jesus explains, “Daughter, your faith has healed you. Go in peace and be freed from your suffering.”
Maybe I’m wrong, but I see Holme getting the story bass-ackwards. In Mark, the woman must believe in something infinitely greater than herself to be cured. In Holme, Jesus explains that there’s nothing greater than the boy. And in that concept, you have modern, woke American leftism in a nutshell: It’s all about you and your approach to sex.
Jews are not immune to this. Decades ago, a gay colleague very kindly invited me to celebrate Passover with him and his friends. I was the only straight person there, and they could not have been nicer to me. They also knew the service inside and out. In that way, they were very observant.
But I observed something myself, and it was that the entire Passover story, about God freeing the Jews from bondage in Egypt and giving them the Ten Commandments was reduced to a parable about gays coming out of the closet. Again, for the left, it’s all about you (and sex).
This is a very powerful message for a spoiled people—and we Americans are spoiled. Most of us have more shelter, more food, more clothes, more safety, more leisure, and more years in our lives than any other people in history. As Glenn Reynolds has pointed out, each of us lives like a king of old.
For some, that fact inspires gratitude that makes us acknowledge even more something greater than ourselves, something that keeps us humble, makes us strive, and provides us with a moral pathway that was an essential part of America’s greatness. As John Adams said, “our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.”
For leftists, though, and for the institutions they have coopted, the Bible is a book that should be shunned to the extent it teaches lessons or makes demands inconsistent with their sexual values. Even better, though, the Bible must be reconfigured to bow before and normalize those same sexual values.
For them, if religion is to survive in leftist land, it mustn’t be the classic, moral, preeminent aspirational force it once was; it must simply affirm leftist shibboleths and give people permission to do whatever they want, as long as what they want fits into the true faith, which is, of course, leftism.
The next two years will determine which Biblical vision America embraces: The one in which we look to God for guidance or the one in which God looks to us for guidance.
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