Author: Ron Belgau

They’re Doing It Wrong

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Suppose that a prominent secular gay organization, hoping to better understand and respond to pro-family Christian groups, sent a reporter to interview Heidi Fleiss, the former Hollywood Madam, in order to get her perspective on why men and women want to marry and start families, and to gain insight on why some of them try to make marriage and family policy a major political issue.

I would think that most of us would recognize this as one of the least intelligent strategies available for understanding what motivates pro-family Christian groups—something more worthy of an article in The Onion or a Saturday Night Live skit than a serious article by activists who hope to affect social policy.

However, on Wednesday, Life Site News published an interview with Joseph Sciambra, a former gay porn actor, escort, sadomasochist, and Satanist. The interviewer, Peter Baklinski, asked Joseph:

Your experience with homosexuality is absolutely terrifying, especially when you relate the kind of sexual acts that were forced upon you and that you forced upon others. What you related of your experience seems quite alien from anything having to do with the political push for gay “marriage”. From your experience on the gay scene for ten years in the 90’s, what do you think is really behind the push for gay “marriage”?

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Fourteen Points

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On April 27, 2001, the members of Courage Seattle met with then-Seattle Auxiliary Bishop George Thomas (now the Bishop of Helena, Montana). Before his consecration as Bishop, Fr. Thomas played an instrumental role in encouraging the creation of a chapter of Courage in Seattle. With the Chapter up and running, he graciously consented to meet with us to see how things were going and to encourage the ministry.

In preparation for Bishop Thomas’s visit, we prepared the following Fourteen Point summary of the approach to ministry we had adopted in Courage Seattle. 

† CHRIST THE CENTER We place Christ at the center of our existence, subordinating all other aspects of our lives and pledge fidelity to Him without counting the cost.

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What Does “Sexual Orientation” Orient?

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The Professor knew, of course, that adolescence grafted a new creature into the original one, and that the complexion of a man’s life was largely determined by how well or ill his original self and his nature as modified by sex rubbed on together.”

— Willa Cather, The Professor’s House

It’s easy to throw around words like gay, straight, lesbian, bisexual, same-sex attracted. But what do these words mean? What is sexual orientation? What does it orient?

The most reliable place to start is not in theory but in experience. And, of course, the experience I know best is my own. So I will start there.

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Prejudice? Or Defending Marriage?

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I think I was in middle school when the pastor of the little Southern Baptist Church I grew up in preached about Jesus’ words on the subject of divorce for the last time. Afterward, he received a great deal of criticism from many in the congregation—including a number of Sunday School teachers and other influential members—who were divorced and remarried.

After that, he did not preach any more sermons condemning divorce.

On the other hand, when there were sermons that denounced the homosexual agenda, or called for reinstating the biblical death penalty for homosexuals, the pastor’s call was met with a resounding “amen,” and there were no protests from the congregation. So those sermons continued throughout my youth, and were still occurring from time to time when I left for college.

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Dorothy Sayers on Modernity’s Sexual Malaise

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In her essay, “The Other Six Deadly Sins,” (collected in Creed or Chaos) Dorothy Sayers writes:

There are two main reasons for which people fall into the sin of Luxuria [lust]. It may be through sheer exuberance of animal spirits: in which case a sharp application of the curb may be all that is needed to bring the body into subjection and remind it of its proper place in the scheme of man’s twofold nature. Or—and this commonly happens in periods of disillusionment like our own, when philosophies are bankrupt and life appears without hope—men and women may turn to lust in sheer boredom and discontent, trying to find in it some stimulus which is not provided by the drab discomfort of their mental and physical surroundings. When that is the case, stern rebukes and restrictions are worse than useless. It is as though one were to endeavour to cure anaemia by bleeding; it only reduces further an already impoverished vitality. The mournful and medical aspect of twentieth-century pornography and promiscuity strongly suggests that we have reached one of these periods of spiritual depression, where people go to bed because they have nothing better to do. In other words, the “regrettable moral laxity” of which respectable people complain may have its root cause not in Luxuria at all, but in some other of the sins of society, and may automatically begin to cure itself when that root cause is removed.

Vocation Roundup

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Vocation is one of the core ideas that guides our writing at Spiritual Friendship. Indeed, to be spiritual friends means to help each other respond to God’s call to love Him and to love our neighbor.

God gives each person gifts, and along with the gifts, a calling to build up the Body of Christ in some particular way. At the same time, our calling is connected with our way of life: are we called to marry or to remain celibate? What kind of community are we called into?

This post provides a roundup of some of the ideas writers at Spiritual Friendship have shared as we have reflected on God’s calling.

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Sexual Ethics and the Trinity: A Follow-Up

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Yesterday’s post on Sexual Ethics and the Trinity was mostly very well received (for which I am grateful). But I did get some criticisms, which I’d like to try to respond to. (I suppose it’s inevitable, when you try to push the conversation in a very different direction, that some readers will not understand where you are going.)

Social and religious context

Why did I write this in the first place? What problem was I trying to address?

In the last 40 years, western culture has gone through a profound shift in its understanding of marriage, human sexuality, and procreation.

This shift has also affected Christians in various ways. In the Catholic Church, contraception, remarriage after divorce, and same-sex unions remain contrary to Church teaching, but this teaching does not receive anything like universal assent in the pews. In other Christian communions, there have been divisive debates about a variety of issues in sexual ethics, with varying levels of official acceptance of changing attitudes toward sexual ethics.

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Sexual Ethics and the Trinity

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God reveals Himself primarily as Father. What does that mean for our understanding of marriage?

Even in Christian culture, marriage is often seen primarily as a romantic and erotic union between a man and a woman. Thus, it has become more and more common, when we want to speak theologically about marriage, to talk about the image of Christ as the bridegroom of the Church.

Moreover, the widespread availability of contraceptives has made children seem a somewhat secondary, and voluntary, addition to marriage. Christians are not as inclined to reflect deeply on the connection between marriage and children as earlier Christian generations did.

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The Question of Truth

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In his excellent posts from Monday (Celibacy Is Not the Gospel and Celibacy in Light of the Resurrection), Wes attempted to respond to the following concern: “If we’re going to ask gay Christians to give up gay sex, that self-denial must be demonstrably good for us.” I liked what he had to say in response, but I think there is something more fundamental that ought to be said.

In “Christian Apologetics” (collected in God in the Dock), C. S. Lewis stresses the importance of focusing first of all on the claim that Christianity is true:

One of the great difficulties is to keep before the audience’s mind the question of truth. They always think you are recommending Christianity not because you think it is true but because it is good. And in the discussion they will at every moment try to escape from the issue ‘True—or False’ into stuff about a good society, or morals, or the incomes of Bishops, or the Spanish Inquisition, or France, or Poland — or anything whatever. You have to keep forcing them back, and again back, to the real point. Only thus will you be able to undermine … [t]heir belief that a certain amount of ‘religion’ is desirable but one mustn’t carry it too far. One must keep on pointing out that Christianity is a statement which, if false, is of no importance, and, if true, of infinite importance. The one thing it cannot be is moderately important.

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