Talking America

A broad church

• Jon Kelly
• 23 Sep 08, 11:43 AM GMT

I've just come back from a church service in Dallas, Texas. What do you expect I encountered there? Revivalist preachers raging against abortion and homosexuality? Fire-and-brimstone denunciations of decadence and immorality?

How about a congregation made up mostly of gay men and women, holding hands as they sang about tolerance and compassion?

The Cathedral of Hope couldn't have been further from a stereotypical Texan place of worship if it had packed itself up and moved to San Francisco. Right in the heart of George Bush's red-state America, here was the kind of place that is supposed to exist only on the more exotic fringes of the West Coast, or in the nightmares of Pat Robertson.

But the ministry has been in the city since 1970. With over 3,800 members, it claims to be the world's largest gay church.

I decided to drop by for the morning service. As I took my pew, I noticed that most of the congregants were dressed smart-casual in chinos and polo shirts. Were it not for a preponderance of Obama badges on their chests, I would have said that they looked more conservative than their counterparts at the Radiant Church the previous week.

There wasn't anything particularly camp about it - not compared to most high Anglican churches back home, at least. It was, however, unambiguously liberal. The sermon was delivered by the visiting anti-death penalty nun Sister Helen Prejean, played by Susan Sarandon in the film Dead Man Walking. "I love this place," she declared, to whoops from her audience.

When the senior pastor, the Rev Dr Jo Hudson, began leading the service, I noticed that the liturgy had been tweaked somewhat to accommodate the audience. References to the Almighty were kept gender-neutral wherever possible: "Lord" was replaced with "Creator" throughout. Hymns like Rise Up O Men of God and Faith of Our Fathers were conspicuous by their absence from the hymn book.

Afterwards, I caught up with Dr Hudson. She'd been forced to leave her previous Methodist ministry after being outed to her superiors. I suggested to her that a lot of outsiders might be surprised that the Cathedral of Hope was flourishing in a place like Dallas.

"Well, when you're somewhere very conservative, then liberal-minded people are more likely to want to come together," she replied. "But I don't buy all this stuff about America being divided. At the end of the day, everyone here is a Christian."

She wasn't the only worshipper I met to have fallen foul of the church's more hard-line wing. Jerry King, 34, had been disowned by his family after they discovered he way gay. His father, a Southern Baptist preacher, had then denounced him from the pulpit.

But Jerry's faith hadn't ultimately been weakened. "I tried for a long time to be an atheist," he told me. "But I just couldn't do it."

He gestured towards the front of the church. "This is the kind of Christianity I believe in: compassion, love, forgiveness."

When I met a married lesbian couple back in Los Angeles, I'd noticed something similar: apparently ultra-liberal people, denounced as the enemy within by the hard right, actually conforming to fairly traditional values.

It's true that Cathedral of Hope had previously faced protests from extremists, such as the Ku Klux Klan and Fred Phelps' rabidly anti-gay Westboro Baptist Church.

But congregant Ronald Boson, 52 - a smartly-dressed financial services professional - told me that the vast majority of mainstream Christians in Dallas showed nothing but courtesy to his fellow worshippers.

"You know, thirty years ago there were places in this town I wouldn't have gone as a black man," he added. "But things have changed.

"It's the same with gay people. Spend some time here and you find we're just like you."

• Permalink
• Comments (21)