Non-Houstonians have such strange ideas about the City of Houston, if they have any ideas at all. Usually it is a surprise for them to find that Houston is the country’s fourth largest city, behind New York, Los Angeles and Chicago. By the end of this decade, it is expected to pass Chicago. Houston had a female mayor, for ten years, almost a third of a century ago and the city had an African-American police chief during that time, as well. Just recently, the city elected a lesbian mayor, Annise Parker. Houston may be a southern city, but it defies easy classification.
Houston’s ‘unusualness’ also was evident at the recent mayoral inauguration, when Joel Osteen (leader of Lakewood Church, claiming 47,000 attendees each week) gave the invocation. What made this unusual was not this mixture of religion and politics—placing one’s hand on a Bible (held by the mayor’s partner) and a ministerial invocation. The unusualness was Osteen’s clearly stated belief, made on TV’s The View, that lesbians, along with all homosexuals, aren’t “God’s best.”
Osteen blessed the new mayor, praying at her inauguration: “God, we just thank you for raising her up. We honor her today and other elected officials . . . We count it a joy and an honor to be here.”
Why would these two individuals team up for this event, when they obviously stand opposed on a deeply personal and political issue? The common wisdom is that ‘politics makes strange bedfellows (or better stated in this case, strange ‘stage-fellows’). Obviously, Mayor Parker’s choice was to have the most prominent Houston religious figure on stage with her, and Osteen had a public stage on which he could pray “in Jesus’ name.” Given Osteen’s positive-thinking ‘soft’ evangelism, perhaps he even thought that the Holy Spirit would have more room to convict and convert the Mayor’s heart.
I am not an enthusiastic proponent of prayers at public events. In spite of that and in spite of whatever calculated motivations brought these two together on the same stage, I celebrate the event, and the city, where a socially conservative evangelical leader and a progressive lesbian mayor could find some common ground, even if of self-interest.
