The lesbian evangelical scholar bravely shared her view of God—in love.
Mollenkott was an evangelical, and so was I. This label allowed her into my life. In a world that divided people into safe and unsafe, us and them, she was one of us. But in truth, there was nothing safe about Virginia Mollenkott.
She was born into a Plymouth Brethren family, and when she fell in love with an older woman, her mother sent her to a Christian boarding school to end the relationship. Later, at Bob Jones University, she continued to struggle with her sexual identity and self-understanding. She confessed to a professor that she loved women; the professor urged her to get married right away. She obeyed. The marriage did not last, and during the 1970s, now Dr. Mollenkott, she began to write about Christianity, gender, and sexuality in ways that would profoundly impact my life.
Women, Men, and the Bible, which sits on my shelf with its light-blue cover and its male and female symbols, has survived many book purges. I keep it because it represents a liberating moment in my development. It reminds me of the way a book can walk into your life and set you free.
When I look at this book now and see my adolescent handwriting in its margins, I realize there is nothing particularly radical about it. It argues, for example, that Christian women ought not to be excluded by referring to Christians as sons or brothers. It argues that God ought not to be thought of as male or female.
A Christian evangelical who was shunned for her lesbianism, she became an influential scholar of the Bible, finding in it acceptance of L.G.B.T.Q. people.
Prominent Christian evangelicals prayed for her destruction, while others say Virginia Ramey Mollenkott saved their lives.
Raised in an evangelical household that disavowed her lesbianism, Dr. Mollenkott became a scholar of the Bible whose books on feminist and gay spirituality offered an expansive, inclusive theology that embraced not just women as equals to men but gay, bisexual and transgender people, too.
She pointed out that Adam, for instance, was male and female before he got lonely. She noted biblical passages that argued for the eradication of all sorts of categories like race, class and gender. And she wrote about how gay people could use the experience of oppression to find compassion and empathy for those who might be hostile toward them.
Dr. Mollenkott often said that she had been radicalized by the Bible. Yet she remained an evangelical.
“Although many right-wing Christians despise what I have done with the keys they put into my hand,” she wrote in an essay in 2004, “the fact is that the same Bible that deeply oppressed me has also been the most vital element in setting me free.”
Dr. Mollenkott died on Sept. 25 at her home in Pompton Plains, N.J. She was 88. Debra Morrison, a longtime friend and former partner, said the cause was respiratory failure and pneumonia.
Dr. Mollenkott had already made a name for herself in evangelical circles in the 1970s as the author of five books about feminist theology when her sixth, “Is the Homosexual My Neighbor? Another Christian View,” appeared in 1978. It quickly changed the conversation around gay people and evangelicals and helped usher in a new era of gay spirituality.
The book, which she wrote with Letha Dawson Scanzoni, a feminist author of religion and social issues, patiently works through the myriad ways that, the authors found, the Bible does not support the conservative Christian credo that homosexuality is a sin. It also examines the trauma that gay Christians and those who love them have endured because of those teachings.
The book’s arguments — theological, exegetical and ethical — were not original to the authors, but they were eloquently and compassionately articulated and “woven together into a uniquely compelling whole,” William M. Stell, an ordained minister and a Princeton doctoral student whose research focuses on evangelical gay activism in the 1970s and ’80s, said in an email.
The book’s publisher at HarperCollins, Clayton Carlson, declared the book “a counter-market publication” — publishing lingo for a book that won’t sell very well — but said he was proud to be publishing it anyway.
“If one Christian gay person, because of this book, experiences a new sense of self-respect and self-acceptance, a sense of his or her acceptability in the eyes of God, then the book will have been worth publishing,” he said in introducing the book at a symposium in San Francisco, just a few months after the city had passed an ordinance banning discrimination against gay people.
Over the years, Dr. Mollenkott and Ms. Scanzoni heard from many gay Christians who said “Is the Homosexual My Neighbor?” had saved them from suicide; they also heard from evangelicals who felt that the book was heretical and that the authors were not real Christians.
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In a letter written in 1989, Bob Jones III, who was then president of Bob Jones University, Dr. Mollenkott’s alma mater, said he was ashamed that she had attended the school and taught there. He described her as a devil for “writing favorably about lesbianism” and said that he believed “it would not be unfit to pray for her destruction.”
The authors had set out to write a book on Christian ethics and social issues. But that changed when Dr. Mollenkott, who was not out publicly, told Ms. Scanzoni that she was a lesbian. As they described the moment in the introduction to the book’s reissue in 1994, Ms. Scanzoni was shocked. She had never met a gay person before, though she had written theoretically about homosexuality. In a painful exchange of letters, the women realized that they would have a very different book on their hands.
In one letter, Dr. Mollenkott wrote, “it was a terrible thing to be a person who has news to tell that can drain the blood out of a good friend’s face.”
Virginia May Ramey was born on Jan. 28, 1932, in Philadelphia, to Frank and May (Lotz) Ramey. Her mother was a butcher and a grocery store owner.; her father was a chiropractor. The family belonged to the Plymouth Brethren, a fundamentalist ministry that met in a storefront. Her father left the family when Virginia was 9.
When she was 11, Virginia fell in love with a 21-year-old woman, and when her mother discovered the relationship, she sent her daughter to a Christian boarding school near Orlando, Fla. There the administrators chastised her for her lesbianism, using the Bible to “clobber her,” as Dr. Mollenkott often said. At 13 she tried to drown herself.
At Bob Jones University, a professor told her to “cure” herself of her homosexuality by marrying a man. Dutifully, she married a fellow student, Fred Mollenkott. After receiving a bachelor’s degree in English, she stayed on to teach English at Bob Jones while her husband completed his undergraduate studies.
Dr. Mollenkott earned a master’s degree in English at Temple University and her Ph.D. at New York University. Her dissertation was on John Milton, the 17th-century English poet who wrote “Paradise Lost,” and her deep dive into his work liberated her thinking about the Bible. She began to read it more critically, as a literary as well as sacred text. In studying Milton’s writings about love and marriage, and about divorce over incompatibility, she found the resolve to divorce Mr. Mollenkott in 1973.
Dr. Mollenkott was a professor of English at Temple and chaired English departments at Shelton College, in Ringwood, N.J., and Nyack College, in Nyack, N.Y., before joining the faculty at William Paterson University in Wayne, N.J. She taught there for three decades, retiring in 1997 as an emerita professor of English.
She married her partner of 17 years, J. Suzannah Tilton, in 2013, after the United States Supreme Court overturned a law that denied federal benefits to same-sex couples. Ms. Tilton died in 2018.
Dr. Mollenkott is survived by her son, Paul, and three granddaughters.
She was the author of 13 books — all written in longhand on a yellow legal pad — on social justice and feminist theology as well as on gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender issues. She also lectured and led retreats.
Dr. Mollenkott grew accustomed to hate mail and death threats, Ms. Morrison said, but would often say, “There are some things worth dying for.”
In 1999, Dr. Mollenkott received a lifetime achievement award from Sage, a nonprofit group that supports older L.G.B.T.Q. people, for “challenging homophobia in Christian institutions.” In 2001, she received a Lambda Literary Award for “best book in the transgender category,” for “Omnigender: A Trans-Religious Approach,” which explored nonbinary experiences in Christian and other religious traditions in early biblical texts.
She envisioned a society in which people could be free to define their own identities, saying in an interview published in 2018 that she considered herself “bi-gender, inwardly identifying myself with males as well as females.”
In the interview, with David Weekley, a transgender minister with the United Methodist Church, she discussed crimes against transgender people and how scholars might do their part by writing about intersectional oppression and its psychological underpinnings.
“Ultimately there is no solution except to learn healthy self-acceptance and mutual support with those who are unlike — or perhaps too similar — to ourselves,” Dr. Mollenkott said, adding, “John Keats said that ‘sympathetic imagination’ — the ability to imagine what someone else is feeling — is the basis for all morality, and I agree.”
Virginia Mollenkott was born in Pennsylvania, USA in 1932. She received her Bachelor’s degree from Bob Jones University (a Protestant university) in 1953, before earning her Master’s degree from Temple University in 1955 and her PhD from New York University in 1964. She then taught English at William Patterson University for 30 years, while doing many lectures at other universities and events and working as a writer or consulter on many journals and councils. In the mid-1960s, Mollenkott began making a point to include women’s literary achievements in her lectures as she her awareness of feminist issues increased. She spoke at the first evangelical feminist conference in Colorado in 1973, and the next year she gave the first women’s liberation speech in Ohio. In 1975, the first gathering of the Evangelical Women’s Caucus was held and Mollenkott spoke at this gathering as well as many others during the following 40 years. Since 1994, she has been a manuscript evaluator for the Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion. In 1992, she was awarded the New Jersey Lesbian and Gay Achievement award and in 1999 the Lifetime Achievement Award from Senior Action in a Gay Environment (SAGE). Mollenkott won the Lambda Literary Award in 2002 for her book Omnigender: A Trans-Religious Approach. Mollenkott has dedicated a significant portion of her life towards arguing for equality for all genders and sexualities within the Christian church, and is now retired in New Jersey.
Want to know more? Check out:
Omnigender: A Trans-Religious Approach by Virginia Mollenkott
Is the Homosexual My Neighbor? A Positive Christian Response by Virginia Mollenkott
The Divine Feminine: The Biblical Imagery of God as Female by Virginia Mollenkott
Fourth chapter of Transforming the Faiths of our Fathers: Women who Changed American Religion, edited by Ann Braude.
Virginia Mollenkott’s website: http://www.virginiamollenkott.com/index.html
