Are You There, God? It’s Me, a Queer Person

Director Sharon “Rocky” Roggio’s feature-length documentary 1946: The Mistranslation that Shifted Culture is the centrepiece film at this year’s Vancouver Queer Film Festival, an annual event that showcases and celebrates the work of queer filmmakers. The film arrives at a time when the protection of queer rights has taken on a new urgency. With violence against trans and queer people on the rise in Canada and the U.S., the documentary offers a means to more fully explore where this discrimination first arose and how it is perpetuated.

Contrary to popular belief, the word “homosexual” was not included in biblical text until 1946, thus opening a world of suffering. How language can shape perception and culture is a fascinating subject. But even more critical is what to do when this power is used to oppress and marginalize people.

The filmmaker has a personal stake in the story. Since coming out as lesbian in her teens, Roggio and her devoutly Christian father have been engaged in an ongoing debate about the word of God. The documentary is a long investigation into how the translation came out, and what the enduring repercussions have been.

The story begins with a group of 22 white male academics working on a translation of the Bible in the 1940s. Two words, malakoi and arsenokoitai, became the basis of a series of biblical passages condemning gay men.

The narrative focuses primarily on two people: Kathy Baldock and Ed Oxford. Baldock’s expertise is in the area of LGBTQ2S+ issues as they pertain to the Christian church. She wrote a book entitled Forging a Sacred Weapon: How the Bible Became Anti-Gay. Oxford, Baldock’s co-researcher, is mostly interested in finding a place of resolution with the fact that he is both gay and a Christian. As he explains in the film, he feels trapped between his Christian friends upset that he won’t stop being gay, and his gay friends who are equally aghast that he’s Christian.

In an attempt at reconciliation, Oxford joined Baldock on a 2017 research trip to Yale University to research the papers of one Luther Allan Weigle, who headed up the translation team for the 1946 Revised Standard Version of the American Bible. It’s in the archives that the pair find an answer to the question of the translation in the form of an exchange of letters between Weigle and a young seminary student from Quebec.

As the seminarian indicates, the use of the term “homosexual” in 1 Corinthians 6:9 is, in fact, a mistranslation of the two original Greek words. Although Weigle agreed in a 1959 letter that there had been an error, no changes to the text would be made for the better part of a decade. In that time, a number of editions of the Bible were issued including The Living Bible, which proved wildly popular after it was taken up by televangelist Billy Graham. Despite or maybe because of its simplistic approach, this version took off like a rocket, and is still one of the most widely read.

The so-called “clobber passages” pertain to the sections in the Bible (both the New Testament and the Old Testament) that are regularly trotted out as proof that God is vehemently anti-gay. But as the film slowly reveals, it’s not God who wrote the Bible, but fallible human beings. The use of scripture to prop up all kinds of horrific stuff isn’t exactly news. Any literal reading of the Bible quickly stumbles across all manner of inconsistencies, fallacies and outright hypocrisies. God apparently hates shellfish as much as he hates gay sex.

Although the six verses in the Bible that pertain to same-sex relations are vastly outnumbered by those that deal with heterosexual acts, the book of Leviticus is particularly condemnatory about same-sex relationships, as a montage of clips in the film featuring evangelical preachers makes clear. Again, there is considerable debate on what the text in Leviticus actually means, as an extended animated sequence on Sodom illustrates.

But the conjoining of the evangelical church and conservative politicians in the U.S. — most notably with the 1980 election of Ronald Reagan — sealed the deal. It became socially and politically acceptable for religious leaders to assail the nation with the message that same-sex relationships were inherently sinful. The AIDS epidemic was construed to be divine punishment: the repercussions of this continue to play out to this day.

All of this material ought to be riveting. To be fair, there is a great deal in the film that is fascinating, but the many structural and pacing problems in the narrative make it something of a slog. As a first-time filmmaker who includes herself in the story, Roggio fumbles things. It doesn’t help matters that both of the principal figures in the film, while obviously earnest and well-meaning, are also a bit irritating. Baldock and Oxford have a way of barging into the more curious sections of the film and going on about themselves. And Roggio’s complex relationship with her evangelical father Sal feels unresolved. Sal is writing his own book about scripture and doggedly determined to stick to the idea that the Bible is the word of God.

Some of the most interesting ideas are raised but never much examined, such as the inherent misogyny behind the ubiquitous phrase “fuck you.” This point is raised by a Jewish rabbi who explains that the phrase is inherently insulting because it equates the idea with a power dynamic. The passive partner is inherently less powerful than the active partner.

Some of the more head-scratching moments include a gay pastor recounting how, as a young man, he came to the understanding that God was fine with gay people after an extended personal chat with the supreme deity of the universe. When God kindly informed him that he took away the man’s stutter and called him to service, he asks, “But you know I’m gay, right?” You can almost hear God roll his eyes.

These scenes make the more serious aspects of the film harder to take. I would have far preferred a deeper focus on how language constructs or deconstructs reality, but the film can’t seem to decide what it wants to be: a careful rereading of scripture, or a treatise on how Christianity and gay people can happily coincide.

A great many documentaries have at their centre a fascinating idea or issue, but not everyone is a great filmmaker. So, what to take from the narrative? Just that like most things having to do with language, religion and sex, it’s incredibly complicated. Made even more so by the fact that the scripture is such a handy weapon when wielded by people with an agenda.

Ultimately, the film is an invitation to look more closely and carefully at how power and language can be used to harm, but also that redemption is equally a creation of the written word.

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'1946: The Mistranslation that Shifted Culture’ screens at the Vancouver Queer Film Festival on Aug. 16.