is not to discover the reasons for the widespread pedophilia scandal, or even to discover why so many clergymen chose to break their vows, not with consenting adults, but with adolescents and children. It is not to change the churches of others, or the church to which I belong. All of these matters must be left for others.
My vocation is to write for Jesus Christ.
It is to belong completely to the Man at the Top.
That means a fidelity to the Jesus of Scripture, the Jesus of the Four Gospels, and it means that I must never bend, in my portrayal of Him or His followers to any attempt to retroject my current values on the past.
If one becomes too involved with doctrinal arguments and sexual and gender controversies, one can be alienated from the Lord.
I can't allow that to happen.
I'm too keenly aware that, in 1960, my agonies as a Catholic became intermingled with questions of pure faith; and, leaving my church, I left the Lord.
So, though I am again and again confronted with the political problems of organized religion, I strive mightily to ignore them.
The Lord Jesus Christ is where my focus belongs. And my commitment to Christ must remain unchanged.
And I know something now which I didn't know when I was eighteen years old, something which the intense study of Scripture continues to reinforce: the politics of religion has almost nothing to do with the biblical Christ.
Try as I might, I can find nothing in Holy Scripture that supports this contemporary obsession with sex and gender on the part of our conservative churches. In fact, the more I study Scripture, the more amazed I am to discover that Jesus Christ Himself cared nothing about gender at all. Over and over the Gospels reveal Jesus treating men and women equally, and indeed insisting upon their equality. The ways in which Jesus approaches women, instructs them, works miracles for them, reveals His identity to them, and uses females and female imagery in His parables makes it abundantly clear that Jesus came to save women as well as men.
The New Testament scholar Ben Witherington III studies these questions in great and satisfying detail in his Women and the Genesis of Christianity. Let me quote one passage:
"Thus, the community of Jesus, both before and after Easter, granted women together with men (not segregated from men as in some pagan cults) an equal right to participate fully in the family of faith." Other scholars have come to similar well-documented and well-explained conclusions.
And I would go so far as to say that the Old Testament too reveals an astonishing number of vibrant and forceful women who play key roles in the stories that we hold to be the foundation of our faith.
Here, for me the two paths - one into the study of the Scripture, and the other into the state of contemporary religion - reveal an immense divide.
The more I study the Lord's words, the more assured I am that He is the transcendent God who compelled love and devotion from me before I even began the intense study of the sacred texts.
When I go to accounts of the Lord's Supper, I find there no division, but only the unifying power of the Eucharist.
Christ gave His Body and Blood to me. He gave it to you.
But one does not have to read the scholars to understand this equality of men and women in the New Testament. It is easy enough for the conscientious reader to discover on her own. Jesus' conversation with the Samaritan woman at the well is a marvelous example of the Lord's invitation to a woman to become His disciple. It is her "testimony" that brings her villagers to Jesus. And on perhaps the busiest day of Our Lord's life, the day of His Resurrection, He stopped near the empty tomb to comfort Mary Magdalene as she wept. In that tenderest of moments, He called her by name.
The early church did not hesitate to declare Mary Magdalene "the Apostle to the Apostles." One has to wonder, how is it that two thousand years later, our churches are arguing about the roles of men and women with such venom and such heat?
I think that - to find the origin of conservative religion's obsession with reproductive rights, and gender roles, one has to look not to the Bible, but to the detailed and responsible histories we have of marriage as an institution, and its evolv-ing meaning over the centuries. And plenty of