Mama Bears (Kyi, 2022)
I paused Mama Bears in the first hour and wrote in my notes:
“It sometimes feels not enough for me that the mamma bears have reformed once their own children are revealed as gay or trans but they don’t necessarily have a reckoning with the harm that their stance did to others.”
Not long after I unpaused the scene, there is a press conference where a momma bear apologizes to the LGBTQ+ community, saying, “I was a hateful reflection of a loving God.”
It is telling more about myself than the film that after that moment, rather than feeling satisfied, I found myself even more frustrated and angry. “Why does the LBGTQ+ community direct so much of their anger against their allies–or potential allies–rather than their oppressors?” It’s not necessarily true that they do, but examining this reaction to the film was illuminating. I might just as well ask why so many conservatives direct energy into creating bathroom bills and vilifying transgender allies (as enablers) when their arguments and rationalizations are so easily debunked? The answer lies somewhere in the culture of fear and the realization that those who are angry, perpetually angry; are more easily distracted, manipulated, and sidetracked.
The film even jokes about this issue when a gay youth whose mom offers free “mom hugs” at a pride parade sparks a slew of messages telling him how “great” his mom is. He had to actively fight against the urge to say that they should have seen her five years ago. What you are now doesn’t erase what you have done before or heal the scars from the wounds you inflicted.
In trying to unpack the conflicting emotions triggered by the documentary, I start with two observations: the documentary is, directly and indirectly, critical of Christianity (or, at least, of certain manifestations of it), and the documentary is focused on Christian responses the GLBTQ+ people rather than on the GLBTQ+ people themselves.
It is . . . not exactly easy, but not impossible . . . to deflect most criticisms of Christianity in a typical gender-identity documentary because it is possible to distance oneself from those parts of the institutionalized religion that one does not practice or even believe are authentic expressions of it. The film tracks such an ideological shift by having a mama bear admit that perceived conflicts between the Bible and science are usually the result of misinterpretations of the Bible or science. So no matter how ingrained and institutionalized the misinterpretations of the Bible might be, there is the potential to escape the spiritual dissonance between what a believer hears preached and what he or she sees practiced (or is herself urged to practice) without abandoning one’s belief in the Bible as the ultimate arbiter and revealer of “Truth” with a capital “T.”
I would argue that some of the conflicting feelings evoked by the mamma bears and (especially) by the cultural, emotional, and spiritual barriers that make it nearly (but not entirely) impossible for them to cross the gulf from one side of the issue to the other may be grounded in misinterpretations about gender-identity. But the film more subtly illustrates the pervasive and systemic misinterpretations about the differences in Christian theology between sorrow, regret, and repentance.
Sorrow and regret are both feelings. Conceptually and culturally they are usually expressed verbally, and they may do little to change or impact the situations that prompt the feelings. To say one is sorry that something happened to another person is not to take responsibility for it nor to own one’s own part in it happening. I can say that I am sorry that GLBTQ+ people have suffered intolerance or persecution at the hands of Christians and not feel myself a part of it. And even if — as happens in the film — I do acknowledge playing a role in it, speaking out against it only after I begin to share in it (as an ally) risks coming across as (or even being) hypocritical. Is my sorrow or regret prompted by a recognition of the injustice of the thing or at the suffering that it caused me? This creates a vicious conundrum whereby one must earn the right to express sorrow or be sorrowful, and that usually means some form of public penance or self-flagellation.
But the purpose of penance is not to earn the right to be sorrowful — penance is an outward reflection of the acknowledgment that one has done wrong. I speak here not as a Catholic who subscribes to the sacramental nature of confession and penance, but penance is not normally assigned until the person is contrite. Repentance comes from the root word “to turn” and it is primarily signaled by stopping whatever one is doing and going in the opposite (metaphorical or literal) direction.
The acknowledgment of wrong is a messy process in religious or areligious communities. Issues of restoration and reconciliation are complicated and may well be worthy goals for the repenting individual, the person (or people) wronged, and the community surrounding them. But we get on some shaky ground when we make these conditions of repentance rather than external signs of it. Sometimes reconciliation may not be possible (the injured party may be no longer accessible) or desired (the injured party may need boundaries and protections from negative behavior more than the offending party needs the perceived benefits of reconciliation).
The meditations in the preceding paragraph lead me to the conviction that as toxic and corrosive as is the transphobia in cultural evangelicalism, it is not the only problem the film reveals. American Christianity has been selling “forgiveness” for so long that it has lost nearly any sense of the gospel being “good news” because it promises justice for the oppressed, not just forgiveness for the oppressors. “Social Justice” has become a synonym in too many Christian circles with secular approaches to cultural conflicts — a way of easily dismissing the pangs of a dulled conscience that are still occasionally pricked by observations of and realizations about systemic injustice. Forgiveness is something we claim too easily and demand that others give to us as freely as God gives, while repentance is something we expect of others but rarely acknowledge that God desires of us. “Christians aren’t perfect, only forgiven,” has become a cultural, generational mantra that like so many aphorisms has a seed of truth but can too easily gloss over complexities and nuances that any healthy theology would address.
No place is this weakness in American evangelical Christianity more stingingly depicted in Mama Bears than in the way that every single participant who chooses to respond to a gay or trans child is ostracized or abandoned by the majority of their Christian friends or church communities. In doing so, such Christians signal that their ultimate value is in conformity, not love. That it is more important that those who suffer (in this case parents) accept the blame and contempt of the community rather than seeking relief from the pain and heartbreak they are feeling and the trauma they are processing.
“Would you rather have a dead son, or a live trans daughter?” one of the mama bears asks when trying to explain what led to her change of behavior toward the child she confesses to having previously spanked every time that child claimed to be a girl. What the film doesn’t show — what it doesn’t have to show for those of us who have lived in and around such communities — is that I know with absolute conviction that a not insubstantial number of Christians who previously formed her social network and helped her forge her own identity as a Christian will claim that she answered that question incorrectly.
Mama Bears is playing at the 2022 Full Frame Documentary Film Festival. For ticketing information, click here.
