BOOK REVIEW: Religion Gone Bad: The Hidden Dangers of the Christian Right by Mel White

 

This book is written by Mel White, a LGBTQ+ activist for over 30 years, and who spent the previous 30 as a ghostwriter and videographer for such Christian fundamentalists as Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson, and Billy Graham. When he came out as gay, and after an amicable divorce from his wife, he married another man in 1994. Due to his past associations, White should be at least one of only a handful of people to know what the religious right and its leaders are all about. This book is about his efforts to talk to, negotiate, and even plead with the televangelists who had been his friends to stop their verbal attacks on gay and lesbian people. In the face of the failure of that, he formed an organization called Soul Force, an LBGTQ+ group who hold peaceful demonstrations across the country to call attention to the danger that this kind of rhetoric inspires.

The first part of the book tells about his days working for the same people he now calls his adversaries. During this time, he was an eyewitness to the development of such influential Christian organizations as the Moral Majority and The Christian Coalition. He knew their ideologies inside and out, and even wrote some of the speeches that the leaders gave when the organizations were formed. With all this background knowledge, no one has any cause to question or suspect his view of events. However, the first seven of the ten chapters of this resembles nothing more or less than Christian bashing. While White freely admits some bitterness to his former colleagues refusing to even admit his existence after he came out as gay, it is pretty obvious that that hurt still runs deep. While what he says may be true, and more than likely is, his constant calling out of the names of those same people gets to be somewhat monotonous. It is true, and many can attest to this, that there are many on the radical Christian right who have been responsible for the verbal assaults on LBGTQ+ people, so it would have been nice if just a few more of them had been named.

It has now been almost 20 years since this book was published, and much has changed since then. Only one of the major four names that are mentioned are still alive, the Respect for Marriage Act was signed into law by the President in 2022, and there has been a growing societal movement to accept LBGTQ+ people as a minority group, which means that crimes against them can be treated as hate crimes and charges brought against perpetrators on a federal level. These changes have been slow in coming, but there has been progress made, and I believe that everyone is the better for them. People like White and his organization may have been influential in contributing to this, but the fact is that I had never even heard of Soul Force before reading this book and looking them up online. Whether that is symptomatic of LBGTQ+ activism being swept under the rug, or that they simply were only one small group that helped to push these changes into public awareness, I suppose will remain unknown. I do know that their philosophy, which is based on the writings and teachings of Mahatma Ghandhi and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., is a great endeavor and should be applauded. I just hope that organization has more understanding and tolerance than this book seems to.