Marc Adams is – let’s see – a direct descendant of John Adams; child of a fundamentalist Christian minister; a former student at Jerry Falwell’s Liberty University; gay; an ordained Humanist minister; author of 9 books; and founder of HeartStrong, which provides help for LGBT students in religious schools.

 

Adams explained that already in kindergarten he felt “different,” and by age 7 realized that while teachers were pushing the boy-girl thing, he was instead attracted to male classmates. At 14, he heard a sermon that opened his eyes – about homosexuality, what it is, and how its practitioners are doomed to be child molesters and to die of AIDS. Unsurprisingly, he believed this message, and became quite depressed, thinking the only solution was to kill himself. Marc noted that during his closeted gay childhood, he never felt bullied by kids – only by adults like the minister who delivered that sermon.

 

His own father was, as noted, a fundamentalist minister too. Adams explained that “fundamentalist” is not the same as “evangelical,” and indeed, fundamentalists regard many evangelicals (like Jerry Falwell) as leftwing liberals and not really even Christian. Living in such a family Adams likened to being Amish and in the military at the same time. While he and his sisters were allowed to watch the music segments of Falwell’s TV programs, they were forbidden to hear his sermons.

 

But one fateful day Marc managed to catch a bit of one, and Falwell said God could change someone’s homosexuality. This was a thunderclap – there was hope – he didn’t have to kill himself. Duly, rebelliously, Marc told his family he was going to Falwell’s Liberty University. This went over like the proverbial lead balloon. Marc was on his own; but he went.

 

Of course, gayness was not permitted at LU, and many students were kicked out on suspicion of it. Marc’s project, while there, was trying to change himself. Fear of Hell was a motivator. He found that he could change his behavior. But he couldn’t change his inner feelings.

 

Meantime, there were some other tenets of behavior in the fundamentalist code that were giving Marc trouble: treatment of women, people of color, and those with different religious beliefs. Adams characterized his own household as “the KKK without sheets;” he sees racism as rooted in such religion; nobody around him had ever questioned these attitudes. Perhaps Marc’s sensitivity here was prompted by an understanding that the attitudes in question extended not only to blacks and non-fundamentalists but also to people like him.

 

At any rate, he realized that he’d been tricked into believing certain (actually horrible) things, and could no longer trust anything he’d been taught. He had to start figuring things out for himself. Regarding his gayness, he grasped that he’d fallen victim to an “idolatry of acceptance,” giving primacy to how others saw him. He decided that, instead, he needed to accept himself.

Coming out to his family was, for Marc, a simple matter of honesty. The reaction by his parents and four sisters was entirely condemnatory.

 

One might wonder how parents can be so hard-hearted to their own children. To explain this, Marc recalled a childhood neighbor family where parent-child relationships were unignorably different from his own family’s – prompting his sisters to openly question whether their own parents didn’t love them like those other parents loved their children.

 

The answer, Marc said, is actually yes. And the problem (guess what) is religion. His parents couldn’t love their children because their religion didn’t allow them to love themselves. For people like them, the central life relationship is the relationship to God, and everything in life is viewed through that filter. Every life challenge is seen as God testing them; their paradigm is not to learn and grow, but to stand fast with their faith.

 

Thus, when Marc told them he’s gay, they responded accordingly. God was testing them. They passed the test. So Marc walked away, and instead built his own “family of choice” based on love.

 

Marc founded HeartStrong because he realized his own painful history is not unique, and many LGBT students trapped in the hostile environment of religious education face similar travail.

Indeed, Jesus is often quoted there: “If your eye causes you to sin, pluck it out; it is better to enter the Kingdom of God with one eye than to have two eyes and be thrown into hell.” (Mark 9:47. Jesus can be exonerated for this appalling statement because he probably never said any such thing; if he even existed at all.) Anyhow, based on this exhortation, if the sin is homosexuality, there’s not much you can do except kill yourself altogether – and gay kids in religious schools are indeed often told this. Thus HeartStrong is conceived as a rescue mission.

 

The website is www.heartstrong.org