As both a proud Eagle Scout and a celibate gay Christian, the vote, and the debate that has proceeded it, is personal.

Growing up, Scouting was an important part of my life. I was seven when I first joined a local homeschool Cub Scout pack and was an active member of that pack and the connected Boy Scout troop until I was 18. I have fond memories of monthly meetings, campouts, summer camp, Scouting for Food, and Eagle Projects. It provided my main source of friendships with boys my own age, and I’m proud to call several of my fellow scouts close friends even today.

The BSA has always been a place where boys become men. The mission of the Boy Scouts of America is “to prepare young people to make ethical and moral choices over their lifetimes by instilling in them the values of the Scout Oath and Scout Law.” Through the many activities required of a scout, boys develop independence, life skills, leadership, and fellowship, which help them transition from adolescence into adulthood. This is an important mission, and the BSA plays an indispensable role in giving boys the tools they need to become active and capable men.

The culmination of every scout’s journey is a project where he is called on to provide a lasting benefit for his local community. However, the abilities necessary to complete this challenge do not emerge overnight—they are learned over the years through the completion of merit badges. While in Scouts, I developed skills like knot tying, swimming, first aid, navigation, CPR, personal management, and many others. Gaining experiences through leadership, camping, and service are also part of advancement.

As an older scout I began passing down knowledge and experience to younger scouts helping them advance through the lower ranks of the program. Organizing hikes and activities also brought me out of my shell, and I began to develop many skills that serve me as an adult.

In addition to skills and activities, Scouting develops character through challenges. We pushed vans out of the mud, we dealt with sprained ankles, dehydration, swamped canoes, torrential rain, lightning strikes, lost friends, bad food, smoky fires, freezing nights, sweltering humidity, and so on. These experiences and memories have left a mark on my life, and have equipped me both to become the man I am today and to work through adult challenges.

I only began to realize I was gay in my last few years as a scout. At that point, it was a secret that shamed me into silence.  But later, after beginning college, I was able to talk with several of my old scout friends about my sexuality. All of them have been supportive and understanding.  Even more importantly, I learned that they still would have been supportive had I found the courage to share sooner. The brotherhood and camaraderie that we formed in scouting would have provided an ideal opportunity to be more open, unlike many other peer settings.

As the BSA’s policy stands today, a merely “avowed” gay member, even if he holds to the BSA’s policy against all sexual conduct, could no longer be a scout. While I didn’t know about the policy at the time, if I had shared my struggle with homosexuality just a few years sooner, I could have been kicked out before I completed my Eagle Scout rank.

It saddens me that the current policy denies boys the opportunities and experiences I had as part of the Boy Scouts, simply because of unchosen sexual attractions. It also sets up a culture of fear and dishonesty, and encourages boys to remain silent or to lie about their sexuality. The average age of a boy coming out about his homosexuality is in the mid teens. This is the most crucially formative time of involvement in scouts and the current policy forces any questioning youth to choose between being honest or being a scout.

One mark of a Boy Scout is bravery. Talking with my friends about being gay was one of the bravest things I’ve ever done. To punish this by exclusion from scouting would have been the worst possible response. I am thankful for my 11 years in the Boy Scouts of America and hopeful that the BSA will make a place for other young men like me when they vote on Thursday.

Gregg Webb recently founded www.eleisonblog.org and can be followed at www.twitter.com/eleisonblog.

Near the end of his narrative, Rauch says this:

And as I write these words, I have been married for going on three years. Married. The very word is a miracle to me. The young boy sitting on the piano bench structured his life, shaped his personality, twisted and then untwisted himself, around the certain knowledge that he could not love in a way which could lead to marriage; and so he grimly determined that he could not love at all. But he was wrong. He underestimated himself and he underestimated his countrymen even more. They and he have found a destination for his love. They and he have found, at last, a name for his soul. It is not monster or eunuch. Nor indeed homosexual. It is: husband.

Gaining the conviction that your love can find its place is a life-altering discovery, and it makes me think of an old post from Eve Tushnet, in which she mentions Rauch, among others:

I’ve written before about how I experienced some fairly intense childhood alienation of basically exactly that kind. I felt like I had no place in the world and couldn’t have one—shouldn’t have one, hadn’t earned love or self-respect. Becoming Catholic, I should say, was in part about accepting that I could be loved by Someone who genuinely knew everything about me. In order to be really Catholic you have to accept healing and love, and there are times when that’s very hard for me, still; it’s still somewhat baffling to think that I might be made in the image of God. (I mean, what does that make God?).

I have no real sense of why I associated that sense of alienation with my sexual orientation. One obvious possibility is homophobia; I certainly don’t remember ever hearing anything antigay until I was in junior high, and my parents had gay friends etc etc, but it’s impossible to prove that I wasn’t somehow affected by subtler and pervasive cultural bigotry. Anyway, point being, I’ve said many times that it was such a relief to come out to myself because it seemed like I could finally explain that alienation in toto; and because being gay wasn’t something I thought anyone should be ashamed of, I could finally put all of that unhappiness and sense of homelessness behind me! I don’t know that this relief is especially common for gay teens, but I do think a lot of gay people did have that childhood sense of intense separation, of being cast out.

And since virtually all gay people are raised by heterosexuals, the home in which we grew up doesn’t provide obvious models for the kind of relationships we want to form. It’s hard for us to know how our own love stories can fit in to our family story, the family model we grew up with. (Yes, I realize that a lot of straight people can say the same thing, but walk with me here for a moment.)

Gay marriage promises that, for those of us lucky enough to grow up with parents in a loving/good-enough marriage, we truly can fit our own futures and dreams into the family story we grew up with. We can step into our parents’ shoes. You all know that I think this promise is based on some really false beliefs about sex difference and family structure, but believe me, I feel the power and attraction of the promise.

And this longing for home is one reason the Church’s silences, clinical language, and general lameness w/r/t speaking to actual gay people is so frustrating. Because the truest and best alternative to the home promised by gay marriage is precisely the home promised by Christ, the loving embrace of the Holy Family. When I say that the cure for alienation is in kneeling at the altar rail, this is not especially believable if the actual Catholics you’ve known were clueless at best and bullying at worst.

Anyway, I continue to believe all the stuff I’ve said in prior posts about gay marriage, but I thought it was important to throw this out there as well. The longing for home is even more powerful to me, and even more beautiful, than the longing for honor which also animates the gay-marriage movement.

What Rauch is saying was so powerful for him—finding that his previously unnamable desires could be channeled and understood to have a place, a destination—is something several of us are trying to explore with regard to a theology of friendship. Rauch was not alone, as a young person, in believing that if he acknowledged his sexual orientation, then all hope for a “normal” life of love would be lost to him. I wonder what other possibilities might have seemed viable to Rauch if he had heard the Church clearly saying—and showing—that friendship, not just marriage and parenthood, is a recognized, honored form of love too.

One of the most important passages in the treatise is the discussion of the three kinds of friendship—carnal, worldly, and spiritual—found in Book I, paragraphs 33-49. (This division of different kinds of friendship is not original to Aelred: Aristotle drew similar distinctions in the Nicomachean Ethics, Book 8, chapters 2-6.)

We might think that Aelred is talking about kinds of friendship in the same way that we think of planes, trains, and automobiles as three different kinds of transport vehicles. Although a car is very different from a plane, and both are very different from a train, each is a legitimate kind of vehicle.

This is not Aelred’s idea, however. He thinks that only spiritual friendship represents a true form of friendship. Carnal and worldly friendship are not real friendship, although many think they are. In speaking of different kinds of friendship, then, Aelred means to distinguish between true friendship and two different kinds of false friendship.

In true friendship, the friends are jointly pursuing love of God and love of neighbor. These are, to them, the highest goods of human life, and they encourage and sustain each other in pursuing and attaining these goods. Aelred calls friendship based on encouraging each other to love God and neighbor spiritual friendship.

However, many people (especially young people) falsely believe that the highest good is pleasure. Those who pursue pleasure as the highest good will find others who share their pursuit, and enjoy their pleasure more by sharing it with others. Thus those who share in the pursuit of pleasure enjoy a kind of appearance of friendship. (Augustine writes about this kind of friendship in the early books of the Confessions.) This kind of friendship Aelred calls carnal friendship.

Many other people (and this error is more common among those who are older) falsely believe that the highest goods are found in worldly success, in acquiring money and accumulating power. Those who value worldly success will form relationships based on mutual advantage. These, too, enjoy an appearance of friendship, which Aelred calls worldly friendship.

Now it should be clear that both those who pursue pleasure above all, and those who pursue worldly success above all, will frequently transgress God’s law. Thus, if we think of friendship as including carnal and worldly friendship, we will think of many examples where men or women have sinned on account of friendship. But, Aelred argues:

Those who share a vested interest in vice falsely claim the fair name of friendship, because one who fails to love is not a friend. One who does not love a comrade loves iniquity, for one who loves iniquity does not love but hates his own soul (cf. Psalm 10:6), and one who does not love his own soul will certainly be unable to love the soul of a comrade (paragraph 35).

True friendship must never ask the friend to sin. Indeed, Aelred has previously argued that a friend is the guardian of love, or even the guardian of the soul itself (paragraph 20).

Although I believe that what I am about to say is consistent with Aelred, for the remainder of this post I will speak more in my own voice, and try to apply the previous points more directly to practical problems in contemporary friendship.

First, it is easy to read too much into the condemnation of pleasure. Here, an excerpt from C. S. Lewis’s Screwtape Letters may prove helpful:

Never forget that when we are dealing with any pleasure in its healthy and normal and satisfying form, we are, in a sense, on the Enemy’s ground. I know we have won many a soul through pleasure. All the same, it is His invention, not ours. He made the pleasures: all our research so far has not enabled us to produce one. All we can do is to encourage the humans to take the pleasures which our Enemy has produced, at times, or in ways, or in degrees, which He has forbidden. Hence we always try to work away from the natural condition of any pleasure to that in which it is least natural, least redolent of its maker, and least pleasurable. An ever increasing craving for an ever diminishing pleasure is the formula. It is more certain; and it’s better style. To get the man’s soul and give him nothing in return—that is what really gladdens Our Father’s heart. (Letter 9)

The problem with carnal friendship is not that the friends enjoy pleasures together. Pleasure is a legitimate good, and in its proper place, pleasure is no sin. The problem with carnal friendship is that the friends place the good of pleasure ahead of either love of God or love of neighbor. Indeed, the more that pleasure is subordinated to love, the more joy one will experience. Lewis again, this time from his sermon, “The Weight of Glory”:

If we consider the unblushing promises of reward and the staggering nature of the rewards promised in the Gospels, it would seem that Our Lord finds our desires not too strong, but too weak. We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea. We are far too easily pleased.

An older friend of mine, now deceased, used to tell the following story to illustrate how to deal with temptation.

While on vacation in Washington, DC, he had happened to pass an adult bookstore. In his younger, wilder days, he had frequented adult bookstores, and as he walked by, he suddenly felt all the old temptations return.

Instead of simply trying to push away the temptation (“Don’t think about that! Don’t think about that! Don’t think about that!”), he thought of the guesthouse where he was staying, and of two of his fellow guests, one a woman from Japan and the other a man from Holland, both of whom had seemed to be interesting people who had been through many fascinating experiences.  He imagined walking back to the guesthouse, inviting the two of them out for dinner, going out to a nice little restaurant in the area, then returning to the guesthouse for an evening’s relaxed conversation, perhaps over a bottle of wine.

He walked back to the guesthouse, invited his fellow guests out to dinner, and had a wonderful evening.

When he told this story, he would quote Proust:  “It is in the imagination, Celeste, that paradise is regained.”  For him, an important part of separating himself from his lustful life involved learning to direct his imagination to healthy and productive outlets.

The pleasures promised by the adult book store involve disobedience to God and using neighbors as sexual objects. In fact, doing so would have involved exchanging the truth of God for a lie.

But though the evening with his fellow guests did not have an explicitly religious focus, it was entirely compatible with charity. He was not trying to use or take advantage of his dinner companions. Nor was any disobedience to God involved.

To make love of God and neighbor our highest good, then, does not involve denying that there is any good in pleasure, any more than loving God above all precludes loving our neighbor. Instead, it involves recognizing each good in its proper place, and never choosing lesser goods in preference to greater goods. In The Abolition of Man, C. S. Lewis writes:

St. Augustine defines virtue as ordo amoris, the ordinate condition of the affections in which every object is accorded that kind or degree of love which is appropriate to it. (cf. De Civ. Dei, xv. 22; ix. 5; xi. 28)

Spiritual friendship involves properly ordered affection. God must be loved above all, and all other loves subordinated to Him. Friends should encourage each other to love God and neighbor rightly, and cherish each others’ love in the degree proper to their situation. Friendship should not be an excuse to avoid duties of charity; Aelred is very clear that we must love everyone, including our enemies (paragraph 32; cf. Matthew 5:44, Luke 6:27-35).

Both here, and in the rest of the treatise on Spiritual Friendship, Aelred is trying to show us how to rightly order our loves, so that our friendships will help us to grow in love for God and charity towards all.

(Cross-posted at First Thoughts)

The response to this drawback was increased surveillance. For religious superiors,

it often seemed easiest to deal with the matter simply by prohibiting outright “particular attachments” in religious life. In later centuries, this prohibition became a commonplace of formation to community life and to the celibate ministry. In their understandable zeal to avoid the dangers of uncontrolled affectivity, the superiors seemed never to realize that they were courting an even greater danger, that of eliminating the human dimension of Christian love, reducing it to a kind of vague and ultimately abstract goodwill by which all are “loved” in general, and no one in practice. Worse still, in many cases they drove human friendship underground and caused it to be viewed as somehow incompatible with the Gospel or at least worthy of suspicion—an attitude whose nefarious consequences are still with us today.

Much of this is immediately relevant to those of us who are trying to develop a workable model of pastoral care for gay and lesbian Christians. Some are understandably worried about the temptations that can come with close friendship between two people who could potentially be attracted to one another, and in this way they resemble the religious superiors Brother John mentions here.

On the other hand, there’s the problem of what Brother John calls the “greater danger”: how can we not leave gay and lesbian Christians prey to isolation, and how can we speak of celibacy not simply as something that makes wider love possible (as it does) but also as a discipline that allows for deeper love among a few? Ron Belgau’s recent post makes a start at answering these questions, highlighting the way that love among friends can become a training ground for loving others beyond that circle, ensuring that “love” doesn’t dissolve into sentimentality (“It’s easier to love humanity as a whole than to love one’s neighbor,” etc.). But more reflection—specifically on the practical questions of what this looks like “on the ground,” in the parish, outside of monastic contexts—is needed.

It was only later, after seminary, that it occurred to me that our debate was, among other things, odd. We students interrogated each other, and each of us felt a (mostly self-imposed) obligation to settle “our position” on the matter. But in retrospect, I view that as strange—because whether women can be ordained to diaconal or priestly/pastoral ministry is not a question that can be “settled” by an individual Christian, even one who’s been to seminary and been ordained. Rather, that’s a matter for churches to decide. Even in the Baptist church to which I belonged at that time, it made no real difference what I as a seminarian thought on the matter; nor would it have made much difference if I’d been a pastor or elder there. What mattered is what my denomination had decided and whether I wanted to remain a part of it, working within its confines or else kicking against the goads.

Some of the current discussions I follow, and am a part of, regarding gay and lesbian persons in the church, remind me of those seminary discussions. I read blogs and talk with friends who are trying to decide whether they, personally, are “Side A” (i.e., believing God blesses and affirms monogamous same-sex partnerships) or “Side B” (i.e., believing that God calls gay and lesbian Christians to abstain from gay sex). Listening into these conversations and participating in them myself, I find myself dwelling more and more on how this way of framing the discussion marginalizes the communal, ecclesial context in which all Christian ethical judgments must be made. Now that I am a member of the Anglican Church in North America, it matters very little, in one sense, what I believe about same-sex unions. My church has rendered a judgment on the matter, and so my question becomes, “Am I willing to be submissive to that judgment or should I look for another church?” (Or the bigger question: “Why am I a member of the Anglican Communion and not, say, Catholic?”)

Or perhaps I could go for a bit more complexity and say, “Am I willing to (a) be submissive, (b) look for a different church, or (c) stay put and work for change?” If I harbored “progressive,” “Side A” convictions on homosexuality, I could see my role as an Anglican as akin to that played by James Alison or Andrew Sullivan in the Roman Catholic Church: to be a prophetic voice of dissent against an ancient prejudice. Or if I held “traditionalist,” “Side B” convictions in, say, The Episcopal Church, I could view my role the way someone like Christopher Seitz views his: I would be called to defend historic Christian teaching on homosexuality in a church increasingly unsympathetic to it. The one thing I couldn’t do, in any of the above cases, would be to behave as if my “personal” views on the question were the most important, decisive thing to focus on.

This, I take it, is not unrelated to the point Rowan Williams made, over and over and again, when he was asked about the apparent discrepancy between his own “private” inclinations to find some way to bless same-sex unions and the Anglican Communion’s opposition to such blessings. Shortly after he became Archbishop of Canterbury, Williams told Time, for instance: “I’m now in a position where I’m bound to say the teaching of the Church is this, the consensus is this. We have not changed our minds corporately. It’s not for me to exploit my position to push a change.” In other words, even the bishop who is primus inter pares cannot allow his convictions to be elevated unduly.

So where does this leave us individual gay Christians in our various churches? Certainly each of us must act. We cannot put our lives on hold. Even though our churches may take a long time to give us the counsel we need to act rightly, that doesn’t mean that we’re able to wait that long before we embark on life-altering courses of action. A well-meaning Anglican priest once said to me, “We don’t yet have the mind of Christ on the issue of loving, faithful same-sex partnerships.” Well, even if I believed that to be true, that wouldn’t remove the urgency of my own choice: should I pursue such a gay partnership or remain celibate? That’s not a decision that can be deferred indefinitely.

It is, though, a decision that can be recognized as not a matter for my own “personal” judgment only. Or, putting it a bit more precisely (and positively), if I am to act according to my conscience, I have to recognize that my conscience is in need of communal formation. As Alan Jacobs put it, writing about his decision to leave The Episcopal Church several years ago,

I believe that I acted according to what Cardinal Newman long ago called “the supreme authority of Conscience… the aboriginal Vicar of Christ.” For Newman, conscience is anything but “private judgment”: it is, rather, the testing of one’s own private judgments, and sometimes those of others, against Scripture and against the long testimony of the whole church of Christ. And if we test those judgments so, and invoke our consciences, we enter perilous territory: as Newman reminds us, the fourth Lateran Council (1215) affirmed that Quidquid fit contra conscientiam, ædificat ad gehennam—Whatever is done in opposition to conscience is conducive to damnation.

If I am a Christian, then I belong (like it or not) to the Body of Christ. By virtue of baptism, I am no longer “my own person”; in belonging to Christ, I also belong to the other members of his body, the church. And so, these days, I find myself less and less interested in asking where each gay Christian, myself included, “stands” on the question of the morality of gay sex. Instead, I want—even, or precisely, as an Anglican—to explore the question Eve Tushnet, a Roman Catholic, raised recently: is there a way to see my own convictions as somehow less important than the matter of my membership in the church of which I’m a part?

I was reminded of that student’s paper the other day, when a friend pointed me to an article by Ken Klukowski, the Director of the Center for Religious Liberty at the Family Research Council, titled “Boy Scout Leaders Propose Incoherent Policy on Gay Scouts.”

But before saying anything about Klukowski, it’s important to understand the proposed change in the Scouts’ policy, which can be found in their “Membership Standards Resolution.” I excerpt three key points from the resolution:

1. “Scouting is a youth program, and any sexual conduct, whether homosexual or heterosexual, by youth of Scouting age is contrary to the virtues of Scouting.”
2. “The Boy Scouts of America does not have an agenda on the matter of sexual orientation, and resolving this complex issue is not the role of the organization, nor may any member use Scouting to promote or advance any social or political position or agenda.”
3. “No youth may be denied membership in the Boy Scouts of America on the basis of sexual orientation or preference alone.”

Now, here is how Klukowski begins his article:

A faction in the Boy Scouts of America (BSA) just proposed a resolution to change BSA’s longstanding policy regarding openly homosexual behavior.

The only reply is, “No. This claim is not true. You either read the text so carelessly that you missed the explicit affirmation that homosexual behavior remains prohibited, or you understood the policy, but deliberately mislead your readers about it.”

“A Scout is trustworthy.” That is the starting point for  the Boy Scout Law. To be trustworthy means that you don’t say something on an important matter unless you have good reason to believe it is true. That means taking the time to understand what those you disagree with are saying, and then representing their position fairly.

The BSA is a private organization, and are free to adopt whatever membership policy they choose. I was not a Boy Scout, and I have no dog in this fight.

With that said, I think the Boy Scouts’ proposed policy change for youth is a good one. It reflects the distinction between sexual orientation and behavior which the Catholic Church—a major sponsor of Boy Scout troops—has consistently drawn since Persona humana in 1975. It is also a distinction which has been more recently made by the Mormon Church, another major sponsor of Boy Scout troops.

However, regardless of whether you think the proposed policy change is good or not, every Christian ought to expect that, at the very minimum, the participants in this debate will tell the truth about each other.

When I teach undergraduates, I reasonably expect them to have read the assigned texts, and to give a fair summary of the author’s argument. Is it unreasonable to expect the same in a public statement from the Director of the Center for Religious Liberty?

Update: Both the National Catholic Committee on Scouting and the Mormon Church have issued statements regarding the proposed policy change. The National Catholic Committee on Scouting does not make a clear statement for or against the change, while the Mormon Church expresses support for the proposed policy on abstinent gay scouts.

(Cross-posted at First Things)

When Frank and I returned early evening that Saturday to our apartment in the Village, I was still shaken. By 2003 Frank had been with me for twenty-two years. Our partnership was repeatedly tested in the fire of social defiance and in the emergency room with family members and each other. Characteristically, Frank spoke not a word. He put down the bags with clean laundry, pulled me against him, and held me tight. Frank’s grip was so firm that his Parkinson’s got his arms wedged hugging me. We were caught, locked, immovable. We laughed. The sinews of our attached muscles held the love that bound us through the tight spot with Marie [Giannone’s sister].

I was home. I was in my faithful friend and partner’s shelter.

I chose this except almost at random. Virtually every chapter is filled with similarly tender moments of quiet intimacy.

It’s these kind of glimpses into gay life (among other things) that make it hard for many Christians today to imagine that there could be anything wrong with being gay. You can’t read a memoir like Giannone’s and easily draw evidence that having a long-time sexual partner of the same-sex diminishes one’s life. On the contrary, Giannone’s partnership with Frank was precisely what enabled him to care for his dying mother and sister, and what sustained him when they were lost.

And this is the reason comparisons of homosexuality to other sinful behaviors often ring so false. Homosexuality is like racism? If that’s the case, then why are the fruits—hatred and alienation in the latter case, humanizing care and love in the former—so obviously different?

The traditional Christian proscription of same-sex sexual partnerships does not require us to draw such specious comparisons or to say that there is nothing good at all in gay partnerships. On the contrary, even Karl Barth, who uncompromisingly rejects homosexual partnerships as out of step with the Creator’s intention, writes that such unions are often “redolent of sanctity” (Church Dogmatics III/4, p. 166) because they are about the struggle to give and receive love. In his essay for First Things yesterday, Aaron Taylor made this point very effectively.

I also think here of the passage from C. S. Lewis’ Surprised by Joy in which he reflects on the homosexuality he witnessed at his boarding school in his adolescence.

People commonly talk as if every other evil were more tolerable than this. But why? … If those of us who have known a school like Wyvern dared to speak the truth, we should have to say that [homosexuality] was, in that time and place, the only foothold or cranny left for certain good things. It was the only counterpoise to the social struggle; the one oasis… in the burning desert of competitive ambition. In his unnatural love-affairs, and perhaps only there, the Blood went a little out of himself, forgot for a few hours that he was One of the Most Important People There Are. It softens the picture.

According to Lewis, a misdirected expression of eros may still be seen as a seeking after truth, goodness, and beauty. And Christian faith can and must acknowledge that, even as it seeks to point eros to its real fulfillment in Christ.

Of course, nearly all Christians believe that bullying is wrong, whether related to sexuality or not. However, I think we often fail to understand some important realities regarding anti-gay bullying in particular. For example, it is important to consider the broader social and cultural environments that bullying takes place within. Far too often Christians provide condemnation without grace when it comes to LGBT issues. Even in broader environments, LGBT teenagers are frequently told that they’re disgusting perverts. They may not be told so to their face, but the message is pervasive enough that it can lead to a lot of internalized shame. I definitely faced this to some degree growing up in a conservative Christian environment and finding myself attracted to both sexes, even though I wasn’t sexually active and held to a traditional sexual ethic. Many LGBT teens are hit much harder than I was. LGBT teens often feel that they are so worthless that bullying towards them doesn’t matter, and generic opposition to bullying rings hollow. I strongly encourage people to read a powerful memoir expressing this, written by a woman who is now a Christian with a conservative understanding of sexual ethics, at My Day of Silence 2009 Post, A Year and A Month Late. She describes how it seemed that everyone hated gay people, and as a result she was “drowning in a sea of hate.” She then goes on to say that it would have been helpful to know that someone thought what was happening was wrong. Let the weight of that sink in.

In recent years, organizations and individuals that affirm gay relationships have made significant efforts to address anti-gay bullying and to save lives. They’ve created the Day of Silence and Spirit Day for straight people to express their solidarity with victims of anti-gay bullying. They’ve created the It Gets Better project to tell teenagers that there is hope for them – a necessary message for anyone considering suicide. Although the people behind these initiatives do promote gay relationships, the goal of these initiatives is primarily to provide support for people who are mistreated and may be considering suicide. We should recognize that they are responding to legitimate injustices and are not merely trying to change minds about sexual ethics. If only those who affirm gay relationships are willing to speak out against injustice, do you think LGBT people will want to listen to anyone else?

I see a few predominant responses from conservative Christians. Many are afraid to address the issue at all, for fear of appearing to affirm gay relationships. Others openly complain about anti-bullying initiatives on the basis of disagreements with the organizers, but don’t offer any alternatives that will be equally effective in saving lives. Jesus called this sort of thing “straining a gnat but swallowing a camel.” In both cases, in the minds of some, rather than appearing like we might condone gay relationships, we instead appear not to really mind bullying against gay people. This isn’t to say that sexual ethics don’t matter or that we need to compromise on them, but rather that the issues surrounding bullying matter immensely and that it is wrong to ignore them.

Here’s my question: where are the conservative Christian responses to bullying that address the real issues of shame, hopelessness, mistreatment, and such? How are we working to save the lives of these vulnerable teenagers? I do know of some excellent Christian ministries that are doing good work in this area that we should all learn from. Bill Henson’s Lead Them Home and Shawn Harrison’s six11 Ministries immediately come to mind. They both recognize that there is more at stake than whether people are living according to traditional Christian sexual ethics. They recognize that suicidal tendencies need to be dealt with, and that simply preaching about sexual ethics is often counterproductive when it makes people feel more worthless. They recognize that LGBT people need to see their worth in the eyes of God and others, and to see that life can get better. They show a great willingness to listen to LGBT people, going out of their way to do so, rather than just preaching at them. They’re not afraid to speak up for those who are mistreated, and to speak against those who bully and oppress. Above all, they treat LGBT people as human beings who have infinite worth, not primarily as issues or political opponents. My exhortation is to learn from them and to show more concern for victims of bullying – there is much more to be done. We must do this regardless of the degree to which we are (or are not) at fault for the way LGBT people are mistreated – our example is Jesus, who gave his life to redeem a situation that was clearly not his fault. Let’s show the love of Christ to those who are hurting.

Friendship often is given short shrift in our culture. As every child knows, the Disney movie ends with the princess marrying her prince charming and not by her forming a lifelong platonic friendship. Where marriage is so significant it demands a wedding ceremony more expensive than a car, friendship is mundane, meriting less deliberate investment and certainly no formal declarations of mutual love and admiration. You could buy a library’s worth of self-help books about cultivating a better marriage, but there is little formal thought devoted to becoming a better friend or what friendship ought to look like.

It hasn’t always been this way. Plato, Aristotle, and Cicero authored works on friendship. In the Eastern Orthodox tradition, there is a ceremony called adelphopoiesis, which is literally translated as “brother-making.” Norwegian, Chinese, and Native American cultures were known to have had ceremonies to honor blood brothers. It’s ironic that, among Christians, we’ve privileged marriage so much highly over friendship despite the fact that our founder Jesus Christ was a man who never married but did invest quite deliberately in 12 friends.

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Throughout much of Christian history, the notion that gender differentiation is part of the image of God (“male and female as the image of God in stereo”) has occasionally surfaced as a marginal voice, but it has never occupied a significant place in the Christian understanding of the imago Dei. The reason is a simple one. If both male and female must be present together in order to fully constitute the image of God, then those who are single do not fully reflect the image of God. This runs deeply against the grain of many passages in the Bible. But even more important, the New Testament clearly proclaims that Jesus is, par excellence, the image of God (e.g., 2 Cor. 4:4; Col. 3:10; 1 Cor. 15:45). Unless we are to postulate an androgynous savior, something the New Testament never even contemplates, we cannot say that the image of God requires the presence of both male and female. It is far better to interpret Genesis 1:27, which insists that both male and female are created in the divine image, to mean that all the dignity, honor, and significance of bearing the divine image belong equally to men and women. We need not delve into the entire debate about what exactly the image of God signifies. For our purposes it is enough to say what is not signified by the divine image: gender complementarity.

One theologian Brownson singles out for criticism is Karl Barth, for whom, Brownson says, “a complementary understanding of gender is essential to the image of God.” Brownson thinks this understanding of the imago Dei would require each person to be married to a member of the opposite sex in order to fully become a divine image-bearer.

But it’s important to see that this is not the conclusion Barth himself draws. Rather, Barth thinks that single people, the widowed, and those who are divorced are still, in their unmarried state, image-bearers. Why? He answers (in Church Dogmatics III/4 §54, with my emphasis added):

It belongs to every human being to be male or female. It also belongs to every human being to be male and female: male in this or that near or distant relationship to the female, and female in a similar relationship to the male. Man is human, and therefore fellow-human, as he is male or female, male and female. But it certainly does not belong to every man to enter into the married state and live in it. The decision to do so is not open to each individual, and there are reasons why it is open to many not to do so. Even then they are still men and therefore male or female, male and female.

What about Brownson’s Christological point—that Jesus was, par excellence, the image of God and yet not “present together” as male with female? For Barth, it is crucial to recognize that Jesus’ celibacy was not a rejection of community—or “co-humanity”—with women (as the Gospels attest, for example, in Luke 8:1-3). As Christopher Roberts summarizes,

On Barth’s terms, sexual difference is still theologically significant for those not called to be part of a couple—such as Jesus. On these terms, it is essential to Jesus’ humanity that he have a relationship as a man with women, but that is not the same as to say that Jesus required a wife or consort. To be celibate rightly is also to declare a choice in response to sexual difference, and Barth would have us regard that Christ’s chastity as a single man is as much a response to sexual difference as marrying. Barth does demand that one must live in encounter with others in the sexual sphere, but that encounter could take the form of a celibacy that upholds chastity between male and female in the community.

Thus, it is not enough to point to Jesus’ celibacy and say, as Brownson does, “If both male and female must be present together in order to fully constitute the image of God, then those who are single do not fully reflect the image of God.” On the contrary, at least according to Barth, those who are single are, in a profound way, “present together” as male and female, not just male or female.