"It was three against one, at least … jumping a guy like that is dishonourable, obviously.

"It's not how white men fight. Yet suddenly, I found myself rooting for the mob against the man, hoping they'd hit him harder, kill him.

"I really wanted them to hurt the kid. I could taste it." Soon after, "an alarm went off" in his brain, Carlson added, telling his producer he realised he was "becoming something" he didn't "want to be."

It was the casual racism that ended up drawing the most attention.

But the more interesting element was the glimpse into a person's conscience at work.

Carlson wasn't at the fight. He saw it, as so many of us see such things online. He identified with the brawlers, despite misgivings about how those like himself should behave.

As Carlson watched, he found himself rooting for their violence, wanting to hurt their victim—actually tasting it.

"An alarm" in his brain kicked in, warning him that he's becoming something he didn't want to be — a murderer, someone who would participate in a lynching.

How conscience works

Tucker Carlson's admission of self-awareness seems to me a good place from which to talk about conscience.

Conscience kicks in when something we might do could seriously re-write the story of who we are. And everything about both the doing and the being is how we relate to others.

It's about who we have been given to be through our relationships and who we will find ourselves becoming if we allow those relationships to run us in this way rather than that.

Now, of course, who we are is always given to us relationally.

We are utterly dependent on others' treatment of us, from conception onwards, and it is not as though we become independent upon reaching adulthood.

What we become, at least legally, is equal to other adults in navigating our different forms of dependency, owning our decisions and accepting consequences.

My "I," my "self," is the way that this body, born at such a time in such a place, navigates viably in the midst of the "we," the social body, which brought it into being.

Most of the time, we go along with the way that the social body runs us.

We pick up its language, its gestures, its customs and the stability given by its legal system, as part of what sustains us and gives us identity. We learn to desire through what it models to us.

And we may, at certain times, make decisions not to do things suggested to us by some sort of apparent authority, simply because we like other ways of doing things.

(For instance, choosing white wine with meat, or red wine with fish. But we would hardly refer to that as a matter of conscience.)

Issues of conscience arise on relatively rare occasions when we detect that "our a — is on the line" with an issue that presents itself.

If we carry on imitating and being drawn along in the way that we have been, suddenly, a line will have been crossed, and we will become someone else.

That is what Tucker Carlson described: his fully-functioning "mirror neurons" were allowing people like him, of whom he more than half approved, to lead him on.

They started to reproduce in him the same desires, emotions and passions that he saw being enacted, to the point that he was even able to "taste" the thrill of being caught up in the lynching mêlée.

Then his conscience said to him, "I see who I am becoming and, woah, I do not want to be that person."

Conscience and the LGBTQ person

I bring this up in an Outreach article, specifically for LGBTQ readers and their friends and allies, since I suspect that the issue of becoming who we are (and feeling "on the line" in the decisions we make) has been strong since we were very young.

After all, even in the best circumstances of a loving family, we begin to discover that we don't know how to go along with expected behaviours.

We discover that we don't share the expected desires and emotions of the majority around us. And we may discover this at quite a young age before we're able to talk about it.

We may or may not have role models, others like ourselves, who can help us imagine coming to viable adulthood. We may be in places or families where who we are is referred to with contempt.

Eventually, "who we are to be" becomes related to "who we love," and this, at puberty, will have consequences related to sexual acts.

Indeed, many of us, especially those who have grown up in strongly religious households, are taught to doubt our feelings and emotions from a very young age.

We come to agree that those feelings are our enemy and not to be trusted as telling us anything true about ourselves.

And in the midst of all this, Christians know of the strength of Bible verses where Jesus tells us that it is better to lose your life, but save your soul, than it is to save your life but lose your soul (Mt. 16:25).

In other words, the biblical equivalent of being "on the line," the existential issues to do with discerning who we are to be, come at us very forcefully in our youth and take many years to work through.

Here, there is a difference between a certain evangelical culture, such as the one I was brought up in, and Catholicism, which I received the grace of entering many years ago.

Evangelical culture, teaching our radical depravity after the fall, effectively freezes into permanence our inability to trust our feelings, thinking of our body as only a source of lies and inspiring a radical lack of confidence.

It tells us not to trust any natural or scientific claims.

So to claim that we are bearers of a non-pathological minority variant is automatically suspect as "the wisdom of this world," a diabolical illusion. The only thing trustworthy is the written Word of God.

This means that, for LGBTQ people from an evangelical background, the entire battle for survival of the soul is fought over "those passages": the clobber texts.

Catholic theological culture is subtly but significantly different. Everything that is created is good, even after the fall. We may be screwed up, but we are still basically good.

Desire is essentially a good thing, however, distorted by our own and other people's waywardness. Our bodies are essentially truth-tellers, bearers of the glory of God in whose image we are made; however much we may make liars of them.

Our goodness is lived out in ways which are often ignorant and always disordered; with these, we have to wrestle over a lifetime.

And this, our lifelong vulnerability to God's creative forgiveness, is something shared with everyone else so that none of us can be judges of another.

Conscience is focused on what really is

Because of this, the question of conscience in Catholic LGBTQ circles is not so much about the interpretation of "the clobber texts" as it is about what really is.

We understand that there is something about being a human — this body in a process of humanisation — that automatically and intrinsically tends to what is true.

Conscience is inherently related to what is true, and our journey is one of stepping out of rumour and falsehood into the freedom of truth.

So, the question is: Is the thing that I am discovering myself to be real or just a phase?

Then, after a time when it clearly isn't a phase, the question becomes: Is what I am discovering myself to be some sort of defect in who I'm supposed to be, something that should be "straightened out"?

Or is this what I am created and gifted to be, and so to be lived with enthusiasm and gratitude as I come to discover what it's all about?

What is true here?

If it were some sort of "defect," then any loving same-sex relationship that includes sexual acts would tip me over into becoming someone that I'm really not — a gay or lesbian person.

And I would have to hold out against that, alerted by some sort of "brain alarm." If you do "y," you will become "x."

However, at this stage, there is no credible evidence that being gay or lesbian is some sort of defect in a human being who ought to be straight.

From everything we have learned over the last 150 or so years, it seems much truer to say that we are bearers of a regularly occurring, non-pathological minority variant in the human condition.

And this has not been "deduced" by boffins in some sort of closed laboratory.

It took quite specific social and historical changes to enable a traditionally half-hidden group, its members often victims of violence, to be recognized, observed and confirmed as bearers of this non-pathological minority variant.

However, once that started to become clear, it has become ever more obvious to the public that the gay and lesbian people whom they meet, and who can be increasingly open about who we are, are not defective straight people.

LGBTQ people tend to flourish as well as anybody else when treated with the same dignity as everybody else.

Moving towards what is "authentically good"

Why is this so important to conscience, from the Catholic perspective?

Because from the Catholic perspective, there is no specifically Christian moral teaching. There is merely teaching about what is authentically good for humans.

And this means that we would have already fulfilled Catholic teaching in large part by allowing ourselves to be guided by what is true about LGBTQ people: that this is just who we are.

The next step in Catholic conscience formation would be the recognition that in ethical matters, "how we behave flows from who we are" (in Latin, agere sequitur esse).

And this, of course, is linked to the Catholic understanding of grace perfecting nature rather than abolishing it or replacing it with something different.

Our flourishing, which is what the Creator wants for us, is to be worked out by all of us, starting from what we are and not in spite of what we are.

All this is available to the Catholic conscience the moment it becomes clear that we are the bearers of an almost banal thing: a regularly occurring, non-pathological minority variant in the human condition.

Is there anything else? Does the Catholic Church have anything else to say about this variant?

Personally, I would claim that formally speaking, it doesn't. There is nothing in divine revelation concerning sexual relations between unrelated consenting adults of the same sex who also share a certain social equality.

"Nevertheless," you might properly reply, "are there not traditional claims by Roman teaching authorities? Do they not have a couple of things to say to us, one of long-standing and one very recent, which has something to do with homosexuality?"

Why, yes! Funny you should mention them.

Traditional claims of Roman teaching authorities

Going back to the second century, the first is that there is no such thing as a good same-sex sexual act.

This claim is made entirely as a negative deduction from the conviction that the only genuinely good sexual act is one between spouses open to procreation. Anything else is a defect from that good sexual act.

There is no other source than this negative deduction for the claim that a same-sex act is "intrinsically evil."

And it should be pointed out that the word "intrinsically" is not a pointer to the gravity of the act.

It is not adding a factor of increased terribleness, however much we may tend to hear it that way. It is merely saying that there is no occasion when this sort of act might be a good act since, for obvious reasons, there's no possibility that it could lead to procreation.

The second claim, in case we were to say, "But we're not trying to achieve procreation, we're sharing love and friendship," is made in a church document as recently as 1986, which I'm paraphrasing here.

"Well, your bodies are, by their very nature, aiming at procreation, and your deeply disordered desire means that you fail to tend towards your appropriate object, an act with someone of the opposite sex".

In other words: "Your tendency itself is disordered as to its object, not part of who you really are.

"You are an intrinsically heterosexual person who suffers from a grave disorder of desire called ‘same-sex attraction,' which you can fight against. And only fighting against it will make you flourish."

Roman dicasteries give no evidence for this position.

Once again, the only source for this claim about who you are is the presumption that all humans have intrinsically heterosexual bodies, and therefore anything other than heterosexual intercourse open to procreation is wrong.

None of this is taught either by the Hebrew Scriptures, Jesus or St. Paul.

Furthermore, those who propose this claim about who you are have notorious difficulty in producing witnesses to the flourishing that supposedly comes from fighting "same-sex attraction."

A number of the early groups proposing "conversion therapy" folded precisely because the opposite became undeniable to them: the flourishing came in those who found themselves in loving partnerships.

Is it too much to suggest that the following is scarcely a lampoon?

"We know more than you do about who you really are. We are confident that what we know is from God, handed on to us through our tradition from the second century and solidified in the 13th.

"It is true that during that period we, along with the rest of humanity, knew little to nothing of the relationship between desire and biology, nothing of how human reproductive organs worked, indeed nothing about sexual orientation at all until the last century or so.

"Nevertheless, we are confident that it is your desire that is leading you astray from our truth."

Learning something new and genuinely true

Now, let us suppose that you have followed a Catholic conscience concerning the possibility of our learning something new and genuinely true about who we are in the midst of fallen reality.

Let us suppose that you have seen that slow, solid learning instantiated in the recognition of the non-pathological minority variant that we bear.

Let us suppose that you have recognized that creation is good, and that there is some ordered-ness toward the Creator in being a bearer of this minority variant.

Let us suppose that you have recognized the principle that grace perfects nature, and that how we act flows from who we are.

If you take on board all those Catholic things, in which you have been obedient to the Magisterium, then perhaps, like me, you will find it odd that some brethren claiming to be "the Magisterium" have an automatic right to be believed, when they behave as if speaking from God, telling you that "you must deduce who you are and how you are to behave from something you are not."

Although our very best available knowledge about Creation tells you that you are not a defective heterosexual, "God, the Creator, demands through us that you so treat yourself."

However, as "Amoris Laetitia" made clear, the Magisterium is only ever alongside and never above the conscience of the faithful. It can only ever be a sibling teaching for us, and never a paternal teaching, for no one on earth is to be called our Father.

The deliverances of the Roman dicasteries in this area are predicated either on untenable claims about who the people involved really are, on bad readings of Scripture, or some mixture of the two.

More seriously, the claims they make seek to oblige a Catholic to suspend a well-formed Catholic conscience in this area, in favour of brethren who claim to know more than we do about who we really are.

Yet, their "knowledge" in this area is only meant to be one of natural learning; it is manifestly less true to reality than what we have appropriately learned from natural sources ourselves. The implied "We know more than you who you really are" is automatically suspect as not an appropriate form of sibling teaching.

Personally, I think it would be disrespectful to church authority to insist that these deliverances are genuinely part of the Magisterium, rather than to recognize them for what they evidently are: theses of venerable antiquity maintained forcibly by Roman dicasteries long after their sell-by date was signalled by the Second Vatican Council.

Maybe it would be better to see them as temporary "instead-of-teachings"— placeholders which "worked" to uphold general norms at a time when human subjectivity, and its own forms of bodily objectivity, were little understood.

Placeholders until we can allow the one Magister, who teaches us all from within our hearts, and can never teach falsehood, time to make available to us what is true about LGBTQ people, and how to live starting from what we know.

Our one Instructor, the Christ, longs to teach us to give ourselves away in love.

And among the things he taught us, in order to make that possible, was how to distinguish between obeying the Word of God, and holding fast to human traditions that make that Word void.

Above all, what Jesus made available for us, and his Spirit still does, was and is how to receive the conscience of sons and daughters of God, heirs to the kingdom, so that we may learn freely how to follow him.

We may learn mercy and generosity starting from where we are. And to do so without being frightened of those who promote hatred and fear of our boldness in discovering what is true and bearing witness to its goodness in our lives.

True Catholicity of conscience

So what is left? Gay and lesbian persons working out for ourselves, alongside and with our pastors, how to follow Christ and what is true and good in our lives, our marriages and so on.

We must draw creatively from the most traditional general sources concerning human flourishing since there is no obvious jurisprudence relating to the newly understood reality we bring to the table.

This confidence inspires an ability to speak about these realities in the first person, unafraid of making mistakes and so learning.

So we may come gradually to un-frighten those who live under the terrible burden that they must sacrifice who they are on the altar of some deity who supposedly demands sacrifice.

Taking up our cross each day and following Jesus does not mean making such a pagan sacrifice.

It means being prepared to live truthfully and lovingly even in the midst of persecution and the threat of persecution.

It means being prepared to lose reputation, livelihood and maybe even life itself in bearing witness to how Jesus detoxifies all our places of shame.

Christ makes possible, and shares love that bears witness to God in places and ways that no sectarian could ever imagine. It is this that allows our shame to be held tenderly in love and gifts us with true catholicity of conscience.

• James Alison is a Catholic priest, theologian and scholar with a particular focus on the philosophy of René Girard. He was educated by the Dominicans at Blackfriars, Oxford and earned his doctorate from the Jesuit School of Philosophy and Theology in Brazil. He is the author of several books, including "Faith Beyond Resentment."
• First published in Outreach. Republished with permission of the author.

Alison (pictured) commented in a recent virtual conversation on the website ‘Outreach' in its monthly series of virtual talks ‘Outspoken.'

In the conversation with Fr James Martin, SJ, Alison discussed natural law and conscience, important topics for all Catholics, but especially for LGBTQ Catholics who often face arguments against them using these concepts.

"The notion of natural law is something that is absolutely essential to Christianity," Alison said.

But, he says, we must remember that part of what the Holy Spirit does is make us "participants, on a very small scale, in understanding what creation, which is much more than us, is actually about."

But Alison noted that natural law has, unfortunately, been used in some cases primarily to restrict people, especially LGBTQ people.

However, homosexuality is now seen as what Alison calls a "non-pathological minority variant in the human condition."

And from the moment it becomes clear that some people are bearers of this minority variant, "which is neither good nor bad," their way of being is "going properly to flourish starting with that, instead of in spite of that."

Becoming children of God

Alison also discussed conscience, emphasising that we are becoming children of God rather than mere servants. "I no longer call you servants…but friends," as Jesus says in the Gospel (Jn 15:15).

Alison sees this as a fundamental insight.

We are, all of us, in the process of becoming children of God.

This doesn't mean that we are perfect, but that we can learn to do things wrong and then do things better—much as a child might do under the care of a loving parent.

Alison said love plays a significant role in this process. "Love turns you into who you really are going to be," he says.

In God's eyes, "the ‘you who I'm calling you to be' has to do with how you learn to give yourself away."

Alison also spoke about what it means for LGBTQ people to encounter "discord" with some aspects of church documents and offered pastoral advice about how natural law and conscience can be understood in this context.

Sources

• Outreach

The comments were made from Wales by Professor Thomas O'Loughlin in "Scapegoating: The Church's fall from grace", a Flashes of Insight conversation with Dr Joe Grayland, Dr James Alison in Spain and Sande Ramage in Palmerston North.

This Flashes of Insight conversation considers the impact on the church's fall from paradise, whether the church is being scapegoated, how the Church is dealing with this crisis and asks about real reform and restorative justice. It is a four-part conversation.

Host Joe Grayland asks if the sex abuse crisis will reconcile the Church with itself and with society or will it be a lost opportunity?

James Alison is an English Roman Catholic priest and theologian noted for his application of René Girard's anthropological theory to Christian systematic theology.

Alison says we all know what scapegoating is - it's when everybody gets together and blames someone for something that is not in fact their fault.

When we say that someone is a scapegoat, we're effectively saying they are falsely accused.

However, Alison says understanding the scapegoat mechanism goes back to something much more ancient. It is the initial way groups create unity and a coming together instead of destroying themselves in a frenzied all against all.

Alison says the group mysteriously finds it came together against one of their own number whom they had thrown out, and then recognised they were right to do so.

He describes it as a basic human act and an effective way of creating unity.

"It works to a certain extent in as far as we all gang up together against someone and throw them out, we become united. We suddenly have peace for a fairly short time."

The people involved think they've done the right thing because 'they've got' the person responsible.

Alison says the difficulty in this process is what he calls the "single-victim mechanism" - everybody calling them guilty for their own interests.

He says we live in a world where the innocence of the victim has become commonplace; the notion that the crucified one turned out to be God is commonplace.

"People are quite unaware of how different our world is in relation to victimhood than the ancient world was, to such an extent that now one of the ways in a violent tussle you try to achieve power is by claiming victimhood. The last thing you would do in the ancient world would be to claim victimhood because everybody knew in the ancient world the victor won."

Alison says modern society uses the scapegoat mechanism to play games to try to get positions of power - to be, as it were, consecrated within the society.

"Is it possible that we've got to a point where Christianity has led us to the situation where victimisation or victims are the victors, and that if you're not a victim, you're obviously a loser," asks Grayland.

Alsion says that Nietzsche thought something like that.

Nietzsche thought that the triumph of victims was a sign of everything that was wrong and that we should go back to having Ubermensch, who would be able to stand firm and not put up with all this victim nonsense.

Alison clarified that Nietzsche's view is not one he agrees with.

He says the challenge for the Church is not to be reactive to real change as it goes through the revolution we are experiencing at the moment.

Alison says he's noticed that some church officials tend to double down on the silliest and worst of their possible positions and make themselves more sacred in response to things coming out.

"Actually, as they do that we all learn what isn't really sacred."

Alison said it is important for the Church to recognise it is not talking about a script, it is not talking about a text, but it is talking about how to interpret 'a book'.

"I sometimes wonder whether this is what Paul was talking about - the catechism, that which holds back the coming of the kingdom.

"Whether he (Paul) had in mind the sense that the church is actually part of how humanity gets over the lynching thing by religious figures playing into the role."

Alison says 'fake religion' is actually how the most positive form of secularism emerges, not the negative.

"The negative forms of secularism are of course very easy to imagine, but the positive form - in other words, the creation of goodness, the ability to see through mechanisms of deceit, hypocrisy, etc. come about as we learn the failed attempt of the church to play the sacred role."

In a strongly worded response to the question, O'Loughlin compares the abuse crisis to being conned by a used-car salesman.

"I don't want to make this sound trivial, but…

"Have you ever been taken in by a used car merchant?

"I was taken in over 20 years ago by one. And you know, even now, I still kick myself.

"Why did I not see through it?

"… And if I ... if I ever saw that guy again, I would just want to deliver…

"So I feel embittered that I have been conned."

O'Loughlin says the Church has for so long held itself up quite explicitly as a beacon to the nations saying the Church sets the moral standards.

"We set the moral agenda, and I feel the part of the attack on the church today is the horror of feeling yourself conned.

"I don't think you can tell people you're bearing witness to the truth. And then tell downright lies," he said.

Ramage suggests that in terms of her experience of the restorative justice process, people have mixed perspectives to a point where the participants sometimes don't know which role they are playing.

She calls it the tension of the opposites and draws inspiration from the Christian image of Christ on the Cross.

"The image of Jesus on the cross - probably most of us can get the idea of when we're crucified and cannot find our way and we are just feeling like a victim persecuted.

"But if we step back and see the whole picture, including the two thieves on either side, I think that's the most powerful one because this is the victim in the tension of opposites that is not integrated.

"So the thief on one side that sees an 'I can have a new way,' the thief on the other side who says, 'nah, I don't want a bar of it'."

Ramage says she thinks the crucifixion is the most powerful image and, as Christians, it is something we somehow have to fit within this crisis.

"The tension is we are both offender and victim," she says.

The Flashes of Insight conversation centred around the responses to the abuse of power by Catholic clergy and religious.

The background to the conversation is René Girard's view of scapegoating.