Yesterday I drove through the rain to facilitate a very tense meeting between board members and community members of our co-op. I drove in silence, preferring to use my time to unpack my emotions concerning the meeting, locate them in my body, and give them space. When it felt safe to take one hand off the wheel, I would place that hand on the location of the emotion I was unpacking: fear in my belly, anxiety in my shoulders, dread in my chest, hope in the region of my sternum. The practice helped ease the tension and quiet my mind, and when I had passed the half-way point of my journey the sky brightened and I saw a very faint end of a rainbow. The rainbow stayed with me for several minutes, a good omen I thought. After the meeting (which went better than I expected) I thought back to the rainbow I had seen. It seemed to me like a herald of better times, of hope, and new beginnings for this beautiful group of people who have been struggling relationally since spring—a very welcome realization with the new school year fast approaching! As I shook off the nerves and slowly wound down for the night after returning home, I decided that I wanted to dive a little deeper into the meaning of the rainbow.
Of course, for anyone raised Christian, the first association with the rainbow is the story of Noah’s flood. The rainbow is seen as a double-edged symbol: God’s judgement on one hand, and his mercy on the other. “Mercy” in this context means surviving a global tantrum thrown by a jealous creator/destroyer spirit by following very precise divine instructions over the course of, oh, about a hundred years. Recently though, the rainbow has taken on even more sinister underpinnings at the hands of Christians. In the words of Ken Ham, founder of the popular conservative Christian Answers in Genesis Foundation, and it’s pet projects the Creation Museum and Ark Encounter:
Sadly, a form of this symbol has been adopted by the LGBTQ community as a symbol for their rebellion and sinful lifestyle. Well, at Answers in Genesis we’ve been “taking back the rainbow” to remind people of its true meaning…In a time when the rainbow is being used to promote a sinful lifestyle, we need to teach our children about the rainbow’s real meaning and point them toward the mercy of our Savior.1
It is worth noting that all three anti-Pride rainbow sites I visited were trying to get me to buy something or donate to “the cause” (or both, as with AiG). There were T-shirts sporting rainbows and slogans such as: “We’re Taking It Back,” and “Rainbow…A Promise of God, Not A Symbol Of Pride.” There were bumper stickers. There was even an indoor projector that spilled rainbow light across your walls or ceiling (which, I have to admit, was legitimately cool). And then there was TakingBackTheRainbow.com (since 2015!), with little information on its site but large banners asking for donations in the name of helping LGBTQ+ people who want to “get out” with “new man and woman clothes,” shelter, and, of course, prayer. It looked like a scam to me.
“Taking back the rainbow” has been a Christian call-to-arms against progressive movements for a number of years now, but apparently last summer it really got underway. Although I hadn’t heard anything about it at the time, some conservative groups coordinated a “Jesus pride month” in July of last year. One of those involved in the effort was Messianic Rabbi Kirt Schneider, who declared:
Enough is enough. … There has not been a consolidated movement within the body of Christ to stand up and oppose unrighteousness as it relates to the LGBT agenda and the hijacking of the rainbow — the sacred symbol of the rainbow that was put in the sky all the way back in the very beginning in the book of Genesis, declaring that God had made an everlasting covenant with humanity. But now God’s people are afraid to be associated with the rainbow.
His words were recorded by Intercessors for America author, Angela Rodriguez. In a blog post written in April of last year, Rodriguez recounts her sadness at deciding not to wear an old rainbow colored shirt she had once loved because she was afraid that people might think she was gay (horrors!) or supportive of “the LGBTQ agenda” (almost as bad!). Conservative Christian groups, you might have noticed, are quite fond of that word. Immediately after her wardrobe collided with her socio-political worldview, she received a message from a friend containing a link to Rabbi Schneider’s speech.
When I heard him say those words, I was confronted with the truth that I had not worn my rainbow shirt because I was afraid of what people would think. But in the video, Schneider declared: “Beloved, the rainbow belongs to God, and it belongs to God’s people.” Then he emphasized that the time has come to unify God’s people to stand up and resist the LGBT movement for the protection of our families, children and our nation. He stressed: “This is the most pressing social issue in the world today, certainly in the Western world.”2
The most pressing social issue in the Western world today. Not children starving. Not human trafficking. Not racial injustice. Not the suppression of children’s access to important information due to school library book banning. Not the dismissal of women’s health concerns in male-dominated modern medical care because men haven’t bothered to study, or fund the study, of half the human population. Not homelessness, especially among trans kids turned out of their homes (too often by “good Christian” parents). Not social and workplace equality of women and minority people. Certainly not the global ecological crisis. No, the most pressing social issue of our day is: we stole their fucking rainbow. How dare we.
This begs the question, did the rainbow ever belong to Christians and the political right to begin with? The editors of Give Me History, a collaboration of high school teachers and freelance writers who share a passion for history, say no. “Symbols rarely, if ever, belong only to a certain group or culture,” they state (well, duh), and continue:
A thing or a phenomenon can symbolize more than one thing, as everyone can assign it a different meaning. One such phenomenon is the rainbow, symbolized since the earliest human civilizations…Humans have always added their own meanings to things they do not understand, and a sky full of different colors was certain to become a symbol of some kind.3
Rainbows have, in fact, been symbolic to humans for as long as humans, rain, and sunlight, have coexisted. In Norse mythology, rainbows were the byfrost, the pathway between Asgard, the realm of the gods, and Midgard, or Earth. Roman, Navajo, Buddhist and Maori mythology likewise view rainbows as pathways between Earth and heaven4. The ancient Greeks saw rainbows as a goddess, Iris, who carried messages between Earth and heaven. The editors of Rainbow Symphony write: “In Homer’s epic the Iliad, Iris was a winged creature who specifically served as the messenger of Zeus. Her presence was always looked upon as a sign of hope.” They also note that rainbows are central to Chinese mythology, and are strongly associated with dragons. In fact:
The dragon is synonymous with the rainbow in Chinese culture as both dwell in the sky between heaven and earth. The word “hong” in Chinese means “rainbow,” and its character is drawn as a two-headed dragon with an arch in the middle that’s very reminiscent of a rainbow.5
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