Winning the religious war.

The key to the next 30 years of gay America? Keep your eye on the churches.

For some of us, of course, this is an old story. Perhaps the first time I self-consciously addressed my homosexuality was at mass. It was sometime around the age of 9 or 10, and as I approached the altar to receive Holy Communion, I remember asking God in a stumbling, incoherent way to help me with "that." I didn't have a word for it yet. In the small-town Catholic family I grew up in, the word homosexual had never been uttered. But I knew it was an indelible, if perplexing, part of me--that it was unmentionable in polite society but that it was somehow something that God might understand. Looking back, I'm more struck by how natural it seemed to approach God with the problem than how terrified and confused I actually was. Faith, even then, seemed for some reason second nature to me. And homosexuality was deeply entwined with it.

The strange thing is, I don't believe this is a rare or unique experience for many gay men and lesbians. Spirituality seems to come naturally to many of us. Maybe it's because we learned from an early age the disciplines of withdrawal and contemplation in the loneliness of gay childhood and adolescence. Maybe it's because adult estrangement from some of our peers breeds an instinctive reflectiveness about the totality of life. But we are spiritual beings nonetheless, and many of us have developed that spirituality into a way of life and worship and ritual that can only be called religion. If I were to posit what the most significant change in gay America will be in the next 30 years, it would surely be related to this. It will be the homecoming of gay Americans into the churches and faiths and synagogues that are rightfully ours. It will be being born again, to borrow a phrase, into the religious life of the family and the country.

The marriage issue--the issue that will transform the gay rights movement in the next decade--will intensify this question. We are right to point out that equal marriage rights are not a matter of religion; they are a matter of civil laws, equally applied, available to all citizens, of any faith and none. There is after all a separation of church and state in this country, or at least there was the last time I checked. But sometimes, I think, we are a little too quick to appease our fellow citizens in this way, a little too swift to eschew any fundamental religious claim, to duck an issue we fear we cannot win. Because the truth is, marriage is also a religious issue. And gay people have a right to the sacred too. They have a right to be initiated into every sacrament the church provides, including matrimony, and a right to be understood in Christian and Jewish terms as having been made in the image of God as surely as heterosexuals are. We have at times perhaps become so ingrained with the rejection traditional religion has projected onto us that we have almost internalized our subtle estrangement from these central rituals and rites of faith. But they are surely ours too; and as surely as gay men and women have sustained the churches for centuries, in clerical garb and out of it, they will be a part of the churches' future.

So it is no accident that, in today's civil rights movement, among the most profound and important changes are happening in the churches. The Episcopal Church is bracing itself for a convulsion over same-sex unions, over the right of openly gay priests to serve God and their communities, over the very rites that are to be used in sacramentalizing the love of gay and lesbian couples for one another. The Presbyterian Church is riven more deeply today over the place of homosexuals than over any other issue since slavery.

Reform Jews have publicly supported civil same-sex marriages and are hard at work finding a theological response. Mormons are creating support groups for the parents and families of lesbians and gay men. Even the Catholic Church is beginning a dialogue on the matter--beneath the radar screen of the hierarchy but unmistakable nonetheless. What is happening in the churches is something relatively simple: Gay people have refused to leave, and their witnessing to their own integrity has begun to generate a seismic shift in the understanding and spiritual awakening of their heterosexual peers. This has occurred not only at the level of the laity but also, critically, at the clerical level, where priests and nuns and rabbis and ministers have finally proved unable to proclaim their own personal inferiority any longer. That courage is contagious, as all truly spiritual courage always is.

I see a change even in my own parish. Four years ago, when the AIDS quilt was in Washington, D.C., there was no mention of it in the sermon, or even pastoral outreach of St. Matthew's parish. Last fall, when the quilt arrived again, panels were laid on the altar and a mass was celebrated for the dead and the living. The pews were full of gay men who had endured over a decade of loss and pain and terror without their church's succor. And now that succor was tangible for the first time. It was possible to be bitter that it took so long for this shift to occur and very understandable to be angry.

But I also couldn't help an almost involuntary choke in my throat as I sensed a slow thawing of the church's incomprehension and fear of the gay people in its midst. As the Communion took place, I found myself quietly weeping, almost unable to believe that I could be initiated into a sacrament of Christ's suffering that also embraced the suffering of the people I loved. The church, I realized, was being church for the first time, church for all its members and especially its most marginalized. No doubt some will take my tears for yet another indication of weakness or passivity in the face of institutionalized homophobia. But for me, they were witness to the power and possibility of Christian reconciliation, a force that is supposed to overcome even the deepest bitterness and most visceral anger.

To those who think this experience is relevant only to the gay men and lesbians who are members of communities of faith, I would say only this: No civil rights movement has ever succeeded in this country without the support of the churches. They provide the moral ballast and spiritual witness that raises a civil rights movement from being a footnote in interest-group politics to being a moral and human crusade. And this is particularly true of the gay civil rights movement. By far the most common reason people give to oppose equality for gay men and lesbians is a religious reason.

Until we have tackled those religious reasons at their core, the political opposition will be impossible to fully dislodge. Until we have fought the theological battle through every scriptural verse and every natural-law argument and every liturgical rite, we can forget making real headway in the secular sphere. The battles are distinct, but until we have won one, we will be able to fight the other only to a draw.

For the past three decades many in the gay civil rights leadership ignored this truth. They were not only theologically ignorant, they were actively dismissive of religion and even sacrilegious in their public demonstrations. To the extent that they defined the core of the civil rights movement, they ensured its political marginalization. But now that they are mercifully in the background, the troops in the pews and the churches and the synagogues can increasingly form the vanguard of the cultural and spiritual war. In 30 years they will be the soldiers we remember.

Sullivan, a senior editor at The New Republic, is the author of Same-Sex Marriage: Pro and Con and Virtually Normal: An Argument About Homosexuality.