Adam and Steve in Paradise
Making pie out of picked cherries: Part I
[The first post of this series, Making pie out of picked cherries: Introduction, was published September 30, 2023.]
There is a dark side to religion. There are several ways to get there, but these three traits trouble me the most:
Believing that a particular religion is the one and only truth
Adhering so absolutely to the details of one religion that the details of other religions are something to fight and/or kill over
Reading the scripture of an ancient religion through contemporary lenses, rather than doing everything possible to see life through the lenses of the ancient people for whom that scripture was written
That third item is the one that troubles me the most, because it supports the other two.
I was raised in the Christian tradition (Episcopal). I don’t know whether Christianity left me or I left it, but seeing it from a distance, and comparing it to non-Christian religions, I have come to believe that in essence, any religion points—or should point—toward the same thing: Love.
Christianity is the religion I bump up against most often. And what I see is that far too many people who call themselves Christian use cherry-picked and misinterpreted scriptural references to support their “right” to discriminate against others, to judge, even to condemn—that is, to do the opposite of love. A favorite target is marriage equality.
Take, for example, the words of a bumper sticker I saw recently.
“One man, one woman. God says it. That does it.”
But does it? Really? I can’t find it. Where does it say that?
And how about this one:
“It’s Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve.”
Discussion vs. Proclamation
When I began to write stories with queer characters, I got involved in online debates about how the Bible views homosexuality. (More on this in future posts.) In these exchanges, it became clear to me that there is a distinct line between having a discussion and making a proclamation. A discussion leaves room for different views and allows for just that: discussion. A proclamation is “It’s my way or the highway. Nothing to talk about.”
I don’t engage with proclaimers any more. But I did become intrigued by which scriptural verses actually concern homosexual behavior, and I was amazed at how few there are. I’m pretty sure there are more injunctions against having sex with someone you’re not married to, and yet so many proclaimers insist that “homosexuals are going to hell.”
As far as I could tell, the only cherry that proclaimers picked, in their insistence of “one man, one woman,” was the story of the Garden of Eden. So I started my research with Genesis.
What they thought were cherries….
If we read the relevant scripture, the interpretations apparent on those bumper stickers are patently flawed. I’d wager that the people who display those stickers don’t even know any of these scriptural facts.
In the story of Eden, it’s widely held that Adam and woman (she didn’t have a name yet) sinned by doing something Yahweh had told them not to do (eat the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil). But before they ate it, they had no understanding of good or evil, obedience or disobedience. How could they be said to have sinned?
When woman tasted the fruit, Adam was right at her elbow. Did he try to stop her? No. So given that she didn’t understand “wrong,” and given that Adam was equally involved in what happened, why is she so widely considered to have caused the downfall of mankind?
Eve wasn’t named Eve until she and Adam were about to be kicked out of Eden. Genesis 3:20 says, “The man called his wife Eve, because she was the mother of all living.”* But at that point, the only “living” (as it applies to humans, at least) were the two of them. She was mother to no one. What was he thinking?
Adam and woman don’t “know” each other until after they leave Eden. (And yet, see the previous point about the meaning of “Eve.”)
And here’s a real kicker: There are three distinctly different creation stories, beginning in Genesis 1:1 and continuing through Genesis 5:32.
The first story and the third refer to both male and female humans together as “Adam.” In these two stories there is no paradise, there is no snake, there is no forbidden fruit, there is no “Eve,” and no one does anything they shouldn’t.
Neither Cain nor Abel (from the Eden story) appears among the many descendants named in the third version.
If anyone is to blame for the downfall of mankind because of what happened in Eden, it’s Yahweh himself. He created Eden. He created the dangerous tree. He created snake. He created Adam and woman, so he knew that they would have curiosity and ambition. And then he pointed Adam right at that tree and said, paraphrasing, “You may have anything here in Paradise, except that.” (Subtext: Don’t think of a blue horse.)
Don’t take this stuff literally
I could go on. But what occurs to me when I consider these points is that although I took Christianity very seriously until my mid-teens, and although I attended Sunday School for years and listened to innumerable sermons, I came away with only one version of Creation. It was a concatenation of the three stories, told in bits and pieces over a period of years, and presented as though they were all the same story (the Garden of Eden). I’m not alone. When I’ve asked people from Christian backgrounds whether they know that there are three distinct stories, I’ve seen reactions ranging from blank stares to thinly-veiled fury.
If Yahweh has a message for us buried in the three different creation stories, it’s this: “Guys, don’t take this stuff literally.”
I became fascinated by the dichotomies that exist between what scripture actually says and how so many people apply it to condemn everyone under that colorful rainbow umbrella. Readers of fiction certainly don’t want me going on about scriptural interpretation in my novels. I don’t blame them. So, instead, I take truths from scripture and weave those truths into my stories.
Sometimes a connection to scripture is obvious. Thinking Straight is about a gay teen sent to a religious “ex-gay” camp. Sometimes it’s more metaphorical. In A Question of Manhood, a straight teen (Paul) adores his older brother (Christopher) who turns out to be flawed (gay), and Paul learns how to shoulder his own responsibilities and help others—that is, he learns how to be a man—from gay teen, JJ (as in Jose Jesus).
My series Blessed Be follows a young gay man through disillusionment with the Episcopal priesthood and into a more accepting Unitarian Universalist tradition. And while my series Trailblazer has no obvious scriptural or religious connections, the central character’s guiding light is always love. All kinds of love.
So by all means, let’s examine biblical scripture. Let’s even take it seriously, if that seems like a good thing to do. But remember that the Bible is not a book. It’s a collections of books. And each one of those books was written for a different group of people, at different times, with understandings about many, many things quite different from how we understand things today.
Adam and Whoever
One last thought on the “Adam and Steve” protestation. Consider that, in the Garden, the only people alive were Adam and woman. Immediately after Yahweh has created woman from Adam’s rib, we see this:
“Therefore a man will leave his father and his mother, and will join with his wife, and they will be one flesh.“ (Genesis, 2:24)
But I ask you: Who is Adam’s father? Who is is mother? And as for the term “wife,” it refers to a woman to whom a specific man is married, as opposed to any woman to whom he is not married. But in Eden, there is only one woman. The word “wife” has no meaning here.
In addition to these terms that have no meaning in their context (“father,” “mother,” “wife”), there’s an important word we don’t see: “Marriage.” If what it takes to be married is to be the only two people on the face of the earth, it doesn’t apply to anyone after Adam and Eve leave Eden.
So for these reasons, and for so many others, to Christians (and everyone else as well), I say this: Follow the teachings of your prophet. It is not yours to judge or to condemn. Go forth in love.
Jesus was a Jew. I can’t think of a better way to see truth despite any religion’s pesky details than to quote Rabbi Irwin Kula: “It’s about love. And it’s about connection. And it is no more complicated than that.”
In future posts of this series, I’ll cover the story of Sodom and Gomorrah and how it is not about homosexuality, as well as other topics still bouncing around in my head.
Occasionally someone asks whether my stories are autobiographical. Odd, since my novels feature gay teens and men, and I’m a het/cis woman. But really, anything I write has at least bits of me in it. This means that—fascinated by comparative religion as I am—religion finds its way into my work.
In my novel For Love of Self, my main character, Spencer Hill, is a Unitarian Universalist (UU) minister. In Chapter Two he delivers his very first sermon to his new congregation (don’t panic; it’s short). While I am not UU, that sermon is one I could have given, myself. If you’re curious, I’ve recorded it here.
* All scriptural references are from the World English Bible, a public domain English translation based on the American Standard Version of the Holy Bible first published in 1901, the Biblia Hebraica Stutgartenza Old Testament, and the Greek Majority Text New Testament.
If Eve was made from Adam's rib, wouldn't that mean she has his DNA, including the Y chromosome? So maybe it is Adam and Steve! Or, Steve was her deadname before she transitioned!
Wonderful!!