The LGBT community, women, and others burning for social change have been flocking to radically transformed versions of Christianity, Judaism and even Buddhism for decades. The first openly transgender professor at an Orthodox Jewish academy, Joy Ladin, teaches at Yeshiva University's Stern College for Women, while at Union Theological Seminary, one of the most foremost Christian divinity schools in the country, liberation theology has been taught since the '70s. And a straight, black, Pentecostal minister I know from East New York, Brooklyn, preaches the moral necessity of marriage equality every chance he gets.
But as we celebrate Pride Month and the anniversary of the Stonewall uprising by LGBT bar patrons fighting back against the police, who were trying violently to arrest them, I wonder why more liberals and progressives don't seek to learn about a fascinating ancient theology called Gnosticism.
Gnosticism, a heretical movement in Judaism and Christianity (and later, Islam and other religions) that flourished from around 100 C.E. to at least the 13th century, was critical of all forms of authority, including, arguably, God's. If you're a believer who's ever wondered why the God of the Judeo-Christian Bible is a "jealous God," one who demands worship and insists on punishing those who worship others, Gnosticism has the perfect answer: That bullying, domineering, egotistical God is not the real God. If, on the other hand, you're an atheist who's always wished you could find a spiritual practice that did not require something that felt like a sadomasochistic relationship with some divine entity and the constant humiliation of the self before this being, Gnosticism may be the perfect faith for you.
In an extraordinary sacred book called The Reality of the Rulers from the third century, the Gnostics link the imperious creator with tyrannical earthly "authorities" and "rulers" of all kinds: When this "blind God" forbids Adam and Eve from eating the fruit of the tree of knowledge, it is simply in order to keep them ignorant and docile. The snake, who is called "the instructor" and who is holy in the Gnostic texts, actually saves the two human beings by inviting them to eat and thus become aware of their own knowledge and power and their connection to a non-dominating divine entity who is referred to as the female (or androgynous) "spiritual principle."
Feminism seems to abound in the Gnostic texts, with many female heroes (including Eve), female incarnations of divinity, and, as you may have heard, Christian gospels attributed to women, such as Mary Magdalene, which criticize the sexism of Jesus' male disciples. (Dan Brown's novels, such as The Da Vinci Code, explore this side of Gnosticism extensively, along with the idea, which some of these gospels suggest, that Jesus may have "loved" or been married to Mary Magdalene.)
Feminists to the core, the Gnostics are the only religious group I know for whom rape is something like the original and most heinous sin. In several of these texts, the evil ruler god and his buddies try to rape Eve and her daughter Norea, but the women resist them, fooling the bullies with dummy (or shadow) versions of themselves while the women escape to save humanity. In this respect, the Gnostic texts might be thought of as something like the Buffy the Vampire Slayer of antiquity, turning traditional religious and heroic narratives on their heads to create a new story about female resistance to illegitimate authority. (When Noah refuses to let Norea into his ark in the time of the Flood, she breathes on it and sets it on fire.)
The Cathars, Gnostics who flourished as an alternative Christian church in medieval France, may even have been pro-gay. Unlike their Catholic contemporaries, they saw nothing wrong with sex outside marriage and in fact believed that non-procreative sex was morally superior to the procreative sort, because it did not result in the creation of more children for the authorities to rule. Unfortunately, scholars aren't sure whether this meant that the Cathars were in favor of sex between women and sex between men, but the evidence would certainly seem to point that way. The Cathars' enemies at the time definitely thought so. In fact, an earlier Gnostic group in Bosnia and Bulgaria, the Bogomils, who provided much of the inspiration for the Cathars, had similar beliefs favoring sexual acts that did not result in procreation, and historians say that their name gave rise to the slang term "buggers" in French and English for those who have anal sex.
According to Gershom Scholem and other scholars, Gnosticism is one of the historical currents that eventually developed into the Kabbalah, the esoteric Jewish mystical practice that, like Gnosticism, attempts to reconcile the goodness of God with the presence of evil in the world without blaming human beings in the process, the way that many other religions do.
In the 1980s, buttons reading "Question Authority" were popular among progressives and feminists of all stripes. If the Gnostics had political buttons, that is surely what they would say, because Gnosticism remains the most important (or maybe even the only) religion in the world for people who are absolutely passionate about questioning authority. Call them the ACT UP of the second century.