Confronting “Bad Religion” Through A New Social Marketing Campaign

By Joseph Ward III

In 2008, a group of civil rights leaders in San Francisco, challenged by hostile anti-LGBT Christian forces, posed a question: can the creative use of social media help boost advances for LGBT equality within mainline Protestant bodies? 

“I was asked to interrogate this question,” says Rev. Peter Laarman, a graduate of Brown and Yale Divinity School and Executive Director of Progressive Christians Uniting. “I coordinated the early work on Believe Out Loud, which we first called the Religious Voices Project.” 

From his office in Los Angeles, Peter witnessed the particularly tense battle for marriage equality across the state. Thousands of LGBT marriages were being threatened by Proposition 8, a ballot initiative designed to restrict marriage to opposite-sex couples. And it was largely supported by anti-LGBT Christian forces. Yet some early research by a think tank called the Movement Advancement Project had discovered that one large group of Christians—the mainline Protestant bodies—included a large ‘moveable middle’ segment of leaders who might be pulled toward a position of firmer advocacy. It was within this context that Peter went to work.

He coordinated efforts under the direction of the LGBT program at the Evelyn and Walter Haas Jr. Fund in California. “The people at the Haas Jr. Fund gave me good parameters,” he said.  “The work had to be thoroughly researched-based, and should enjoy total support and buy-in from the existing advocacy groups.” 

Peter began making calls and traveling across the country to work with key faith and LGBT movement leaders. Dr. Robert P. Jones of Public Religion Research in Washington D.C. was commissioned to conduct an unprecedented study to confirm that a “moveable middle” body does exists within mainline Protestant clergy. The Clergy Voices Survey, became the foundation for the Believe Out Loud campaign. 

As Peter and his team met with faith and LGBT movement leaders they “won broad support by being extremely respectful of the work that the existing advocacy groups were already doing,” he said. These groups include affinity groups within the mainline bodies, and also the faith programs of the Human Rights Campaign, the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force and GLAAD. They were committed to creating an effort that supported the work of the hundreds of faith leaders and civil rights activist in the field. “We found the activists to be incredibly generous and receptive—and also refreshingly blunt about what they wanted and what they did not want from this new resource,” he said.

Peter doesn’t consider himself “much of an LGBT justice activist.” So why did he thrust himself into the eye of the LGBT movement and the battle for inclusive church reform? He sums up his motivator in two simple words: bad religion. 

“It has never been possible for me to separate the vicious and damaging kind of public homophobia from the terrible influence of religion that confuses personal holiness with some kind of imagined sexual purity” he said. “The kind that rushes to judge and condemn the ‘impure,’ and that implicitly endorses violence against persons who are different.” 

As a former pastor of Judson Memorial Church in Greenwich Village, Peter was confronted with the real lives and real stories of his LGBT and straight congregants challenged by this reality. “I don’t think any responsible pastor who really listens to his or her congregants can help but be concerned about the corrosive effects of ‘bad religion’ and be motivated to do something about it,” he said.

Peter also lost a partner to AIDS in the late 1980’s, which had a profound impact on him and the destructiveness of anti-LGBT Christianity. “Bad religion caused Alan’s own family and many of his friends to ostracize him during his terrible ordeal. Alan’s death seared my soul and turned me into an implacable enemy of toxic religion,” he said.

Peter’s intellectual, humorous, and passionate stewardship has shaped Believe Out Loud into a powerful online platform and safe space for Christians and non-Christians to build community and communion. In its third year of operation, Believe Out Loud reaches almost 70,000 direct online constituents on a daily basis and is administered and managed by Intersections International. Rev. Robert Chase, Executive Director of Intersections and Sung Won Park, Believe Out Loud’s first director were critical allies. They helped birth the campaign shaped by groundbreaking research and dozens of interactions across the country. “The thing that thrills me is how Believe Out Loud continues to grow and change. I appreciate the loving care and nurture that Intersections has given it –and specifically the care that designated project staff have given to it. They really grasp how precious this thing is, they have poured themselves into building it up, and as young leaders they are completely at home in the world of social media,” Peter said.

“Working on Believe Out Loud has been the most challenging (and satisfying) part of my own involvement in LGBT justice,” he said. “It was challenging because we were venturing into unknown territory and not everyone could immediately grasp its importance. This meant that fundraising in particular was very tough at the beginning (and still is) … But think about all the young people who have been forced to put religion into one compartment and their own sexuality into a very different, fear-wrapped compartment. We wanted people to have the chance to experience the ineffable joy that comes from feeling God’s undiscriminating love and the sense of freedom and self-respect that goes with that.”

Today, Peter is involved with a different type of battle around tax reform issues in California. “I’m very seriously immersed right now in helping birth a statewide interfaith project that is focused on Golden State governmental dysfunction—notably our state’s unique restrictions on raising taxes that began with Prop 13 in 1978.” He also continues to work with Believe Out Loud as an advisor for the campaign’s new leadership team. “Believe Out Loud is still very much a work in progress but I am fervently hopeful that it will continue to have an impact for a lot of people who desperately need something exactly like this.”

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Image courtesy of Rev. Peter Laarman