Transcript
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Hi, this is Grant Lockridge.
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I'm here with Jared Tafta and Sharon Rogio and pull up a chair across the counter.
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Your one-stop shop for a variety of perspectives around Jesus and Christianity.
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Sharon, you shared a nickname with us, which is Rocky, and I love nicknames, so I'm going to be using that, if that's all right.
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And my first question is where did that nickname come from?
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sure?
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Well, uh, my family's from philadelphia and we're south philly, italiano, you know, and uh, very evangelical, which I would say is kind of patriarchal.
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So I don't know where my dad got this idea, but he wanted to name one of his boys rocky.
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But unfortunately he had four daughters and I'm the closest to a boy that he ever got and so I adopted the name as a nickname a while back, just to kind of add some levity around this issue which I've been dealing with for a long time as a queer person in the church, and my dad's a pastor.
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So that's that whole evangelical kind of edge of the, you know, men lead, and Rocky's a great man name, you know.
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So I don't I who knows.
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That's just where I think it comes from.
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We'll have to ask Sal, my dad, what his side of the story is, and his name is Sal.
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Yeah, sal Roggio, yep.
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All right, cool.
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All right, cool.
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Yeah, I mean just what you even there there's a lot of jam packed things, even in the beginning of that sentence, of the nickname and all of that.
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I know that Grant got connected with you through the documentary that you've done recently and brought to completion, and then he was inspired to not do a documentary like he was planning to after seeing how much effort went into that.
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And, yeah, I feel like you're ready to go with some of the things on your mind, even with what you just mentioned.
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So tell me more about the documentary and then tell me more about, like you said, that issue that's been prevalent in your life.
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Well, definitely, documentary filmmaking is wildly underestimated and I underestimated it myself.
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I'm a filmmaker from los angeles and I also grew up in the church as a lesbian and my dad's a pastor.
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You know, those things don't don't mix.
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But once I wanted to do a documentary trying to affirm my reality with my non-affirming parents, learning how to re-examine the bible, look at passages differently, exegesis, you know, and all this stuff.
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I'm like, well, I'll just do a documentary I've done with my non-affirming parents, learning how to re-examine the Bible, look at passages differently, exegesis, you know, and all this stuff.
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I'm like, well, I'll just do a documentary.
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I've done narrative music video, you know, commercial, whatever you name it, and this was the hardest thing I've ever had to do in my life and yeah, but I'm glad we got through it and we made a wonderful film.
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We've won 24 film awards on the festival circuit at really great film festivals and the audience has been responding really well and we're changing lives.
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We're really making an impact.
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But the film is about the first time the word homosexual appeared in the Bible and we have the evidence through translation notes pulled from the archives at Yale University that it was indeed a mistranslation and so we wanted to make an empathetic film that led with these notes, these translation notes, to get to how did this word come into play into the Bible and does it make an impact in our society.
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And we were able to showcase that through a relationship with me and my dad and really get to my story which isn't really unique in this situation, but it's unique to me and be able to have an example of two people who wildly disagree on this issue and lay out what I would present is an indisputable fact so we can lead with, we can show from the notes what happened here and this isn't my opinion or my feelings, and so how can we have a conversation around it?
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So we wanted to make a conversational piece that affords us an opportunity to take a step back from what we've been told, where we come from, what we might believe, and at the very least recognize how we use or misuse the Bible and how it can be used to hurt people.
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And maybe we can do a little bit better.
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That would be the least that we can ask in making this film.
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So that's kind of my little bit of long elevator pitch.
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That was pretty good, yeah, I mean, it's almost like you've said that a couple of times.
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Maybe I've only been doing this now.
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We're in our sixth year now with our impact campaign and really going out, and I've been meeting church communities all over the world, literally.
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So I just got back from Singapore.
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We were in the Netherlands earlier.
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We just got the film into French subtitles how Fancy Are we?
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And we're going to be doing Paris Pride, we're working on two different Chinese dialects, we're going to be doing Taiwan Pride and then working to go to Hong Kong, and the list goes on.
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So we're making a wonderful impact here at home, which is completely necessary.
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But our goal is also global influence as far as how we again use or misuse not only the Bible but ancient texts, and how we're treating one another in the world.
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So yeah, I've been doing it a little while, but it's fun, oh yeah.
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When I was watching to me there was a ton of interesting story arcs as far as you guys actually going to Yale and finding all the documents and looking through pages and pages and pages and finding what you wanted.
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That was kind of cool.
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But my personal favorite and the most interesting thing that happened in the film to me was you bringing your dad into it, whose evangelical pastor wrote a book, or it looked like he wrote a book.
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That's basically the opposite direction of why this is not okay in the church and that was just super interesting to me as far as, like one, you included that in the film, which I thought was really cool and super interesting just to be able to show both sides of that.
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It wasn't like, hey, what we're doing is 100% on par.
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It was like, hey, there's this side too, and kind of working together so that you guys could love each other a little better was really cool.
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So that was my personal favorite part of of the film.
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Yeah, thank you.
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I'm sure a lot of people struggle with that and one of the takeaways is we're not going to change everybody's mind.
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This isn't a Hollywood story.
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But we also wanted to make sure and my dad put a lot of trust into being in the film that his words would be used properly and well and he would get equal representation with all the other experts in the film.
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He is an expert in his field and he deserves that respect.
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And so again, yeah, we wanted to, you know, do our best to have an academic, journalistic approach, and I'm so grateful that my dad said, yes, he might now have a different opinion.
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No, I'm just kidding, he's a very funny guy he's.
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If you ask him how he got to be in the film, he'll say he feels he got tricked.
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But you know, honestly, that's what he said at the world premiere.
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But he keeps showing up.
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He's there, he shows up and he is convicted, and that's one of the things that I admire about my dad.
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So we knew where he was coming from and we wanted to lay that out in the most honest way that we could To that end.
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There is a lot of helpful information in there and we hope that people will be able to recognize the contextual history that was laid out, the context in the history around the biblical verses that we're talking about, to potentially move with us in a direction that is more affirming and is more accepting of the LGBTQ community, understanding that what's going on in the Bible is very different from our understanding of homosexuality today, and we continue to learn more.
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So there's a hopeful ending.
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It's not a Hollywood ending.
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So what is just?
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What would you say is the best argument?
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We're not a debate podcast, so we're not going to debate back and forth, but I don't know another way to say it.
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What would you say?
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your best argument for LGBTQ inclusion in the church would be Well, besides the fact that I think it's what Jesus would do, I really don't see him condemning queer people, as a matter of fact, in Matthew 19, I see him affirming the sexual minorities of his time.
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When he was asked about marriage, he slyfully says well, you know the verse, you know what it says, and then he quotes it and then he's like but you know, I'm going to tell you something and it's only for those who are able to receive it.
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There are eunuchs who are made eunuchs by choice, eunuchs that are made that way by the kingdom of God, and eunuchs that are born that way.
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And it's just a really interesting thing for him to say, in a sense, where you know he didn't have to talk like where did this come from?
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You know, it just seems to me that he was saying we're all welcome in this kingdom of God.
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And how?
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Why are you using, why are you proof texting to me almost so that's how I look at that.
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But besides that, that's an interpretation for me.
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If we're looking at the scholarly consensus of what the film argues in the sense of the six clobber passages, what's going on and what was going on in the ancient world was sex was something you used to do to somebody, not with somebody, and so you were able to penetrate, no pun intended, you know, nevermind if you didn't.
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I didn't use a pun there.
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I usually I usually do and now, spoiler alert, I won't be able to use it later on in the podcast but you could penetrate pretty much essentially anything you wanted, as long as they were of lesser value than you.
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And so these high society men were doing these acts to animals, to boys, to slaves and prostitutes.
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Now we don't see a lot of abuse or written abuse about young women in the text.
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We do see a lot of examples of what we can assume would be pederasty, especially in the New Testament texts.
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But when you think about it, the men couldn't spoil the women.
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They were doing this to other agencies or other objects because the women had to be virgins.
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And so once you start really putting yourself into the mind of a person from the ancient time of what was really going on there, they were letting out their acts in other ways and there was definitely not a biblical view on you know, the biblical view on marriage is all over the place, and they were not one man, one woman, it was one man, many concubine, and then they were seeing these acts and doing these acts, and so that's what they were trying to get a handle of.
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Another way to look at it, too, is when you're a person of that high status and you're really a man, you're on top.
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The last thing you would want to do is give up that right in society, and so if you were essentially acting like a woman and being the penetrated, you're now no longer a man in that society.
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You have given yourself up, even if it's not consensual, even if it's not like a prostitute situation, which is what we were seeing going on there.
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The pederasty, the prostitute, the slave, or well, that's pretty much it, because that would be the child.
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So, even if they were not agreeing to this, they were still then cast aside because they lost their value.
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They were shunned.
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And we still see the shunning today in society.
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We see it through shaming, rape.
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Shaming happens in our culture.
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We still see it in other cultures where women will be shunned and or killed if they've been abused, because they've brought shame to the family.
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And so it's like why would the Malakoi in our film now I'm getting into the words which you haven't seen the film.
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There's a lot that goes on there.
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There's the passive participant and the active participant in this sex act, and if the passive participant is an innocent person in this, why would they be condemned too?
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And it's about the purging of this land and the purging of this act.
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That's like feminizing men and the Malakoi.
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It's interesting that the actual word means soft or like a coward, and we still do this today.
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You hit like a girl, you're a pansy, you know.
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And so it's about.
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It has everything to do rooted in patriarchy, misogyny and feminizing men, and even though their ideas of sexuality and the objects and not really sex with somebody in a love situation, their ideas were different, these ideas of patriarchy and misogyny still run deep today, if that makes sense, which is why the rabbi's joke in the film which isn't really a joke, but he makes a joke about FU he's like why do we still use it?
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In a way, it's like FU, it's a derogatory term and it's because and it's what we see in the Sodom texts it's about using your power over someone you know.
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Otherwise the FU would be like oh, thank you very much for the sweet blessing.
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You know, I haven't had a wonderful sexual experience in a long time, so I would.
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That's what the film argues is to start looking at those themes.
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We know it's not a homosexual, because that's a group of people.
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We're looking at an act that has two different participants in two different different situations, in a contextual, historical context that is very different than today.
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You could have a homosexual orientation and have never had a sex act.
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If you can just start there, maybe you can start to peel away the other layers.
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I know that was a lot.
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He's written a page of notes over here.
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We call it Jared's page of notes a lot he's.
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He's written a page of notes over here.
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We call it jared's page of notes.
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Um, what, what is pederasty?
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He said that word a few times.
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I'm not familiar with that word so pederasty is an something that was going on in the ancient world and it was different in roman culture and greek culture and in these acts that they were doing, um, but essentially it was sex with young boys and they would have the sex with the boys until they hit puberty.
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And in Greek culture they would use the boys as almost a way to.
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If you were of a lesser class, the mothers would essentially groom their young boys for this horrific act to be used in such a way by Greek elites to hopefully get a role in society, to be able to be placed in a good role in society and have a chance for a better future in the world.
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They weren't doing that so much in the Roman culture, but they were still participating in these acts.
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They were participating in the temple prostitution acts, but pederasty was very prevalent and very rampant in the ancient world.
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I'm kind of tracking with you, but I just want more clarity.
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When you mentioned and thank you for clarifying that I know what you're talking about.
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I just didn't know the name for that.
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So when you're sharing about the patriarchy and feminizing men, those don't completely click together in my head.
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As far as like why and what Like why do you perceive that that was taking place?
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Or what was the purpose behind that?
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And like what was the desired outcome in that taking place?
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Does that make sense?
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Well, I mean, the only thing that I can say is that is what the scholarly consensus would has taught me in regards to way that they interpret these texts, that that's what's going on there in in these contexts, and there's research out there that I wouldn't be able to say.
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I just mean even understanding.
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I don't know that I was understanding what that meant, like when you said the, like the feminizing of men or the patriarchy, and like those being the roots, like I felt, like you were saying you had an understanding of, like the direction of that, or like a whether it was like a political or governmental, or like a reigning.
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Was it to hold power?
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Was it to?
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Does that make sense what I'm saying?
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Yeah, that's one way.
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it's used today, you know that's one way it's used today to hold power, you know, and to keep men on top and women submissive.
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And we see that even in some Christian doctrine, like, for example, when we look at some Bibles that are produced and the committees that put them together.
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They've put them together in a way where they support things like the Nashville Statement, which is a modern document made by evangelicals to again make sure that the church understands the role of a man and the role of a woman.
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As soon as women started to get their rights, the church needed to make sure that they're getting a handle on these ideas, these ideas.
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So this is an example of people using the text in a way that is manipulating.
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For what you said power I don't know what the ancient authors were actually thinking of the time.
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The only thing we can look at is we know it's not a homosexual, because and here are some of the examples of what it could be and then another way to even look around it is like when you look at the Levitical passages 18, 22,.
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That is the one where it says man shall not lie with male as he does with a female, for it's an abomination, and that word male there encompasses all men.
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They use a car, which is a really interesting choice, but that's a whole nother thing.
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And then, in 2013, they give the death penalty.
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But if you look at the verse right after that, it's man shall not lie with animal as he does with a woman, for it's an abomination.
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Both shall be put to death, and we know the animal is not consenting to this act to death, and we know the animal is not consenting to this act.
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This is again about just you could penetrate anything you wanted.
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Their ideas of sexuality were not in alignment with where we are today, but the data does suggest that there's definitely misogyny and patriarchy involved in there.
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And going back to the Sodom and Gomorrah stories, we see all throughout the Bible, even and we've seen it all throughout the world where men essentially will rape other men after they've conquered a village, and so this is all about power, dominance and shaming someone else, and so we do have to recognize that some of those notes would and could possibly play into the intention of, potentially, the act.
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Maybe not necessarily the authors, you know.
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They might not have had those deep thoughts of it at the time.
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So is this oversimplification?
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Because I like to kind of keep things to where I can understand it a little bit.
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So it's not.
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It is a question of homosexuality, but it's more to you, a question of consent is the bigger question, basically.
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Yeah, I mean.
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No, it's not about homosexuality, it's again about an act, and so their understanding of what a homosexual would be.
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they wouldn't have had an idea of what a homosexual was, so there wasn't even an understanding of that being a possibility.
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This is all the possibility that it was.
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You know, yeah, because what I'm hearing you say, and even when you use like Jesus's words of representing like a eunuch, or like the act of non-consensual, or man lying with man or lying with beast, like I recognize that you're basically saying like they weren't describing by the data an identity, correct, correct.
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So I hear you and like like okay, I recognize what you're saying, like it was, this is an act and this is an act and that is an act and these are approved, not approved, and then we can get into translations.
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But even when you use like um, when you were talking about like unix and things like that, like I think of that as those who have like with the translation, I understand that to be speaking to is those who have chosen not to participate in sexual acts, either by force or by choice or by nature of birth.
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And then the secondary thing you said is you can have a I'm rephrasing but you can have a homosexual paradigm and I've never committed a sex act or something like that.
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So like historically, I hear you saying, like, the data does not highlight an identity, it's talking about acts.
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Well, it actually only talks about one act particularly, which is anal penetration.
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So, if we want to get really specific, it's only talking about that one act.
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And so the Bible technically never talks about lesbians and lesbian sex and lesbianism would be 100% okay.
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And so, to that end, there are men that I know that live in Christianity, that will be in a relationship and do everything but that one act, because the Bible says and that's the only thing that the Bible says, is that one act.
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I still think that that's not a proper assumption of what the ancient authors were writing today and our understanding of who homosexuals are, and I still think the Bible and we can affirm the queer community period in our society.
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But, yeah, technically that would be correct, you are completely tracking, but then you, you know lesbians are off the hook, uh, but then that doesn't let.
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yeah, well, that's kind of my two questions.
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So, like you, you presented another question which and I'm not my my genuine, my singular, genuine desire in life is to know what is true.
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Yeah, and so.
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I don't, I don't, I don't have ideologies or paradigms that I am bound.
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They're not bound to my identity, like I know that if I show up in a room I'm probably the most wrong, and so I think a lot of times our pride, it gets in the way of us believing that the paradigm we have is most right, and so we don't have the ability to have vulnerable conversation and learn.
00:23:21.175 --> 00:23:36.647
But to me, the danger there is that every time someone says, well, I stand here and someone else says I stand here, we then paint a picture of what that means that person believes, and then I paint a picture of what that means I believe.
00:23:36.647 --> 00:23:43.121
And so now we're both stationary in objection to one another instead of discovery-oriented in the ability to grow toward truth.
00:23:43.121 --> 00:23:54.438
And so I don't love that and I find it hard to get away from, because it even happens in the Christian historical paradigm of Calvinism and Arminianism.
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It doesn't matter If you say something that somewhat aligns with John Calvin, and that means you believe all the things he believes.
00:24:00.631 --> 00:24:18.711
Or if you say something, or if I say I disagree to some area, it's like, oh well, you must be the right or you must be the left, or you might and I feel like like part of my issue in any area is, I think we're oversimplifying what an identity of a human being made in the image of God is.
00:24:19.353 --> 00:24:20.375
Yes, thank you.
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And so the difficulty there is.
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That means having vulnerable conversations where you say I disagree and the other person says I disagree would mean that you could like share that and not mean I disagree and therefore I know that I'm right and you were wrong, but there's some point of conflict and so to come.
00:24:45.162 --> 00:24:53.790
I actually believe one of the hardest things in life to do is come to actual agreement, like a hundred percent agreement, and marriage probably never will right.
00:24:53.830 --> 00:24:56.011
Right, because we are not all knowing.
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And so the reason I'm asking the questions I'm asking is not because I am looking to be in a corner and you be in a corner or any of us have different opinions.
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I just want more understanding of Christ and what is true and what is loving.
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And I agree with you.
00:25:14.340 --> 00:25:19.462
I believe that Jesus would love the LGBTQ community.
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I don't know that we agree on all stances of what Jesus would do, but I know that it would not look.
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He did not hate minorities and he did not come in and condemn those that he disagreed with.
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Actually, you see, the Son of God show up on scene and have a lot of tenderness for those that were outcasts and those that felt like they didn't fit or didn't have a place in certain societal settings.
00:25:42.079 --> 00:25:53.196
So the the line of question there earlier where you said like it's not highlighting an identity, see to me like I agree with you.
00:25:53.196 --> 00:26:25.346
And then the like current standard of the lgbtq community is, um, it it seems deeply oriented toward an identity around sexuality, and so I would think orientation is probably a better word is that is you know you can't really saying like yeah, I understand what you're saying, but maybe just for semantic purposes and just for clarification, because an orientation is something that you're, you're, you're born with essentially, or an identity might be.
00:26:25.646 --> 00:26:43.127
I clearly identify as a gay, whatever you know like, and some people may and some people may not, and they still might be have an orientation, you know so okay, um, so orientation being the better word, um, what you're saying is is something that it's like written into code.
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It's not something that you choose as much as like a way that you're in nature, way that you're born.
00:26:47.586 --> 00:27:21.059
So, if we go with that um definition, it sounded like you were saying the the text, statistically, weren't looking at at, at orientations, they were just looking at acts and then yeah, totally, you know, and to that end, you know, like paul paul was really part of a stoic society and when he was writing, even like just talking about lesbianism, really quickly going back to that, uh, everybody would be like probably listening to this podcast.
00:27:21.059 --> 00:27:22.202
But what about Romans one?
00:27:22.202 --> 00:27:31.730
So it's only been for the last couple hundred years that church, the churches, have been using Romans one as an attack against lesbians.
00:27:31.730 --> 00:27:36.888
But prior to that, church fathers never used that verse as an attack on it.
00:27:36.888 --> 00:27:40.960
They didn't look at it as the women exchanging natural use for one another.
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The natural use was their idea of sex, was the only appropriate sex act.
00:27:46.076 --> 00:27:48.261
So this is where heterosexuals are in trouble.
00:27:48.829 --> 00:27:55.313
And you know there's only six verses that condemn homosexual acts, if you want to call them that same sex activity acts in the Bible.
00:27:55.313 --> 00:27:59.898
But there are over 200 in the Bible that condemn heterosexual acts.
00:27:59.898 --> 00:28:11.320
The only acceptable act was, you know, for male and female, for the purpose of procreation.
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And so With a marriage, yeah, with a marriage, I mean, you know, but it was really just, you know.
00:28:18.910 --> 00:28:26.720
But even Paul believed that Jesus was coming back in his time, so he thought all of this was just a waste of time, you know.
00:28:26.720 --> 00:28:33.022
So he was really just looking into his culture and seeing what was going on and writing about that.
00:28:33.022 --> 00:28:36.892
He wasn't writing about women having sex with one another and writing about that.
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He wasn't writing about women having sex with one another.
00:28:38.537 --> 00:28:40.323
If you look at the text, it says and their women exchanged.
00:28:40.323 --> 00:28:48.262
The women were owned by the men and they were doing this in a group together, and that's what Romans 1 was always looked at prior to.
00:28:48.262 --> 00:28:55.883
It became convenient to start targeting it toward what we are seeing in the culture and put it toward lesbian sex.
00:28:57.023 --> 00:29:08.554
So when you earlier you said the Bible never talks about lesbianism, and that would mean that it's 100% allowed, and regardless of lesbianism.
00:29:08.554 --> 00:29:13.963
The thing that struck me in that is so we may differ on this in some way.
00:29:14.471 --> 00:29:25.059
I don't actually read the Bible as a rule book, and so I don't either I'm really just using the language of the, of the church and the language of yeah, yeah, yeah.
00:29:25.210 --> 00:29:42.237
That's what I was going to say is like that to me seems like a uh, like a uh, a very dangerous way to read the text, because it's not like just because it doesn't say something doesn't mean that like a hundred percent all right.
00:29:42.356 --> 00:29:43.559
So when we were, I was like no, no.
00:29:43.559 --> 00:29:46.532
When we were making the movie.
00:29:46.573 --> 00:29:50.162
You know, we're really, really wanted to think how would my dad think?
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How, how are people really thinking about these things?
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And really, you know, in a sense with, with great compassion and sensitivity, because not only do I see how much it's impacted the queer Christians who have grown up and have or have not made it through, because they've, they've, they've decided to leave this world, because the, the trauma is too much, you know.
00:30:10.798 --> 00:30:23.944
Uh, so we really wanted to make sure that we were, um, empathetic in that way and really listening to both sides, to put together something where we could communicate through to everyone.
00:30:23.944 --> 00:30:27.640
It was a very challenging assignment.
00:30:28.692 --> 00:30:38.462
I could see that that's so interesting you just trying to get in the head of someone who is completely disagrees with you.
00:30:38.462 --> 00:31:03.782
That's to me a incredibly valuable exercise that I try to do, that I'm not very good at, because it's really hard, because you, you know, grown up your whole life Like I'm from Greenville, south Carolina, right, so like you know, and that's kind of my paradigm, or at least from where I'm from, so that it comes with a lot of evangelicalism, that comes with a lot.
00:31:03.782 --> 00:31:06.614
We have a church on every corner that sort of thing.
00:31:06.974 --> 00:31:20.692
So I just grew up in a lot of that, and me trying to actually think about things in a way that I wouldn't normally is actually a lot harder than I thought it was going to be.
00:31:20.692 --> 00:31:26.195
Like when I'm interviewing you, I'm trying to think, like, what is she trying to say?
