In the Church’s calendar today it’s the 6^th Sunday in Ordinary time- the 3^rd after Pentecost. In the secular calendar it’s Father’s Day, and in our local calendar the Sunday of the PVD Pride Weekend.

Over the decades Pride month with its customary Pride marches has morphed with changes in cultural attitudes towards homosexuality. I refer you to this week’s E-News Epistle in which I wrote a more detailed overview of the derivation and contested meanings of the term homosexual, along with an overview of the constituent communities that nestle under the umbrella of the LGBTQ+ Rainbow Alliance.

For me the significance of the acronym LGBTQ+ lies in its modeling not of a single community but of an alliance of different communities coexisting under a collective umbrella. The Rainbow Alliance is an alliance of differences in a celebration of diversity. Given the increasing forces polarizing our society, the toleration of contested differences within alliances of diversity is an important model for a possible way forward.

The adoption of the colors of the rainbow as the emblem of the LGBTQ+ Rainbow Alliance reminds us that in the Bible, the rainbow is the divine commitment to a regeneration of the creation after the total devastation of the Flood. The rainbow is a sign of God’s new covenant with humanity and the creation – a reminder of the divine faithfulness and mercy – a symbol of hope, beauty, and of the divine presence guiding us into a new future.

Someone recently sent me a cartoon which said God- the original they/them. Pride Festival has over the years become a wider cultural celebration – no longer just an LGBTQ+ event – but a true community-wide carnival.

Providence Pride comes at the end of a week in which the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) reaffirmed its prohibition on women exercising authority in the church – unless that authority is vicariously derived from the overall authority of a male leader. To emphasize their point, they expelled from the SBC all the churches with a woman in overall pastoral leadership.

Religious organizations are prone to delusion. SB thinking is that this move will stem the hemorrhage of members leaving the SBC. Currently at around 13 million members – its estimated that the Convention has lost 1.1 million members just in the past three years with half a million in the last year alone. From the outside looking in – it’s been a bad week for the SBC. Clearly their loss must surely become the American Baptists USA’s gain. Listen- you can hear the clapping in Providence’s First Baptist Church in America from here!

Conservative Christian traditions – evangelical, catholic, or orthodox, are at odds with the social and cultural evolution that has redefined relations between men and women. They cling onto a 1^st-century social structuring of gender relations rooted in the theological notion of a Bible-based Fatherhood of God that is immutable to change.

God is male and sits at the apex of the authority pyramid. Therefore, men are the human beings most like a male God. According to Genesis it was Adam whom the divine community created first from the dust of the earth. As the male God reigns from heaven, so the men exercise the male God’s vicarious authority as the heads of family units within which women and children nestle in protective custody.

This argument is on shaky ground when we remember that in Genesis God gave all authority over creation not to Adam alone, but to Adam and Eve as a couple. But hey, who cares about this small discrepancy, because as the argument goes we know Jesus only called men as disciples and Paul said women must not be allowed to speak in church.

Abstracting sideways from the family we arrive at the church – which for the SBC at least seems nothing more than a collection of male headed families grouped under male religious leadership – an extension from the family of the same pyramid structure of authority and culture of protective custody for women and children. Like all forms of custody – protective or otherwise – attempts to challenge it -or to step outside its control – are met with punishment – the usual one of being cast out of family and church. Social death and still in some places, physical death is the ultimate punishment for challenging the hierarchy of male authority.

We should not miss two essential points in this debate around male authority. Gender rooted authority resting on the privilege of maleness is the root of all cycles of abuse in church life regardless of denomination. Gender rooted male privilege is conceived of as a zero-sum game. Like all authoritarian regimes no change is possible for fear that any change – no matter how seemingly inconsequential – will result in the whole edifice being swept away.

Last week SBC leadership signaled that they understand the core issue only too well. For if the wall of strict male dominated gender based authority is breached, where will things end?

Well, we all know the answer to that question. It means that any change in the status quo will result in so much more than allowing women a voice. One change opens the door to questions that go to the very heart of the construction of gender identity itself. Women in religious authority today – what’s to stop trans women exercising religious authority tomorrow?

The actions of the SBC this past week allow me to segue nicely into the celebration of Father’s Day. The notion of fatherhood along with just about every other traditional institution in our society is a hotly contested one. All roads lead to Rome – as the saying goes. If human fatherhood is in contention, then the fatherhood of God as identified with the exclusively male gender also comes into contention.

Underpinning shifting understandings around how gender identity is constructed lie the complexities of nature v nurture, biology v social conditioning, somatic bodies v psychological minds. All I have space to say here is that for many motherhood and fatherhood can no longer be perfectly aligned with traditional notions of gender identity-based roles. Because ultimately, both motherhood and fatherhood are essential qualities of the divine – and are thus reflected in our human nature without discrimination – taking us on a journey beyond all cultural gendered distinctions.

We can trace three great cultural emancipation movements that have changed the modern world during the last 250 years. The first emancipation movement took the 19^th century by storm with the ending of commercial slavery. The emancipation of women followed close on the heels of slavery’s abolition. In our own living memory homosexuality has been freed from the shackles of legal persecution and punishment – paving the way towards a growing social acceptance of lesbian and gay sexual identities. A fourth cultural upheaval is upon us with the questioning of premodern constructions of gender identity.

Each shift in culture has been accompanied by an interrogation of the Biblical voice – freeing it to speak its truth into new contexts. Episcopalians together with mainline Protestants have been in the vanguard of this evolution – an evolution fiercely resisted by Evangelicals and the official voice of the Catholic Church at every step of the way. The struggle continues.

The confluence of Pride and Father’s Day this year focuses attention on the questioning of traditional constructions of gender. Questioning leads to reaction and the tactics of traditional gender conformity reaction are taking an increasingly fascist turn.

No longer content to arrange matters within their own institutions and communities, white Christian nationalist traditions such as the SBC see no downside to supping with the devil in their pursuit of political power – such is their fear of any change leading to a loss of historic privilege. Through the courting of power, they seek to enforce their religious worldview on the rest of society through a very unconservative legislative intrusion into the arenas of freedom of religious conscience and individual choice.

When the historic champions of freedom of religion, freedom of choice, freedom of speech, and little or no government regulation become the party of religious infringement of women’s rights, don’t say gay, public library book bans, and an Orwellian intrusion into the arena of parental choice – we need to wake to the fact that we have entered a world no longer for the faint-hearted.