I started responding to one of the comments that I received on yesterday’s post, and the response kind of took on a life of its own. Jose Ma writes:

A gay person trying to live the Church’s teaching is a hero in a way that a chaste straight Christian just can’t be. They will always have a legitimate outlet for their needs for affection and sexuality. Gays can’t have that. We can’t get around that fact. Celibacy is a beautiful sacrifice for the sake of the kingdom when freely chosen. When you have to be celibate forever because of things outside your control it’s a lot less beautiful at first.

This concern is really common amongst LGBTQ Christians who find themselves in the position of having to live celibately when they have not chosen this state of life. From a purely academic point of view, it’s an interesting reversal: in the early church, celibacy was a radical and liberating option precisely because it gave people the ability to exercise choice with respect to their sexuality. In most cultures, throughout most of history, marriage has been the unchosen vocation: people were routinely forced into conjugal intimacy through circumstances beyond their control. Although the Mediaevals romanticized the Virgin Martyrs as icons of purity pitted against lascivious Roman governors, in fact the reason that consecrated virginity was a scandal to Roman society is that it undermined patria potestas, allowing young girls to refuse the marriages that their fathers had arranged for them.

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Given the volume of unhelpful literature published on the topic of homosexuality and Christianity, I should perhaps not have been surprised to find Dale O’Leary’s latest piece at Crisis Magazine distinctly unimpressive. I did expect, however, that an article entitled “Homosexuality: A New Approach is Needed,” would at least attempt to articulate an approach that was actually new, instead of simply regurgitating the pop Freudianism and New Age psychobabble that forms the standard conservative Christian approach to gay issues.

The central pillar of this approach is that homosexuality is an “attachment disorder” brought about by failure to identify with a same-sex parent. This failure is invariably presented as the fault of the parent. In a much older article published by Crisis, which, again, falsely bills itself as offering “a new approach,” we read the following:

Aardweg notes that most homosexuals report lack of masculine influence from their fathers, ranging from lack of involvement in the child’s education to open hostility … Bieber found that 75 percent of his sample described their fathers as detached and 45 percent described their fathers as hostile …  Aardweg quotes homosexuals’ descriptions of their relationship with their fathers: “My father was interested in my brother and not me”; “My father was a weak person; he was frequently ill”; “I only met my father on Sundays when he was not working… for me he was no more than a visitor.”

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I recently posted a link to Jerry Walls’s essay, “Homosexual Behavior and Fornication: Intimate Bedfellows,” in which he argued that Christians have no chance of challenging homosexual behavior with integrity if they do not begin with the far more prevalent sin among heterosexuals. James Mace, one of his good friends and former students, responded in the comments. While generally agreeing with Walls’s argument, Mace raised what he sees as an important difference between the two. Here is what he wrote:

While noting some similarities, nobody has taken into consideration the differences between the offensive pro-homosexual movement and the lack of such a movement of pro-adulterers. There is no Fornicators Pride movement actively undermining Christian theology to rewrite God’s word to say that fornication is the way God made us.

Thus, while the article has many true things re which I rejoice, I am disturbed by the seeming willingness to abandon the defense against attacks on theology and praxis from Sodomist ideologues, falsely equating them with garden-variety fornicators while ignoring determinative distinctions in their religio-socio-political agenda.

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One of the more interesting points for me in Sherif Girgis, Ryan Anderson, and Robert George’s book What is Marriage? was their reflection on how the legalization of same-sex marriage may contribute to demoting friendship as a lesser form of love. If marriage is so important that it has to be defined as the place where intimacy is available, then friendship, by contrast, looks paler and less attractive than ever. “We come to see friendships as mere rest stops on the way back to family life,” the authors write.

In her most recent editorial for Christianity Today, “Same-Sex Marriage and the Single Christian,” Katelyn Beaty, a single, heterosexual woman (and a friend of mine) explores this point powerfully and poignantly. Writing about the elevation of marriage in the evangelical Christian world—an elevation that mirrors, in ironic ways, the wider society’s elevation of marriage—Beaty says:

[L]ocal churches have acted as if monogamous sexual unions are the closest icon of heaven in this life. That no matter how much self-giving ministry or cultural creativity we undertake in our lifetimes, they are second-best without a spouse and children in tow.

In more detail than this space allows, other writers and theologians (I think especially of Rodney Clapp and Joseph Hellerman) have deftly tackled American Christians’ overemphasis on marriage. What I might offer to the conversation is the perspective of a single Christian. As I watch many fellow young Christians come out in support of gay marriage, lest they bar friends or family from finding the gift of sexual companionship, they are making it harder for me to make sense of chastity.

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Jerry Walls has a new post up on Houston Baptist University’s Christian Thought blog called Homosexual Behavior and Fornication: Intimate Bedfellows. Here is the heart of his argument:

Christians have no chance whatever of challenging homosexual behavior with integrity unless they start with the sexual sins of heterosexuals. We cannot take a morally credible stand against the sexual sins of the small minority of the population if we condone the sexual sins favored by over 90% percent of the population. If fornication is okay, if casual divorce is no big deal, then it rings utterly hollow to try to take a loud (or even a quiet) stand on homosexual behavior.

Of course, challenging heterosexual sin is no simple matter in contemporary culture. For the fact of the matter is that the non-marital sexual practices of many persons, including Christians, flow quite naturally out of the worldview in which they have been steeped (unfortunately many Christians are shaped more by pop culture than they are by Scripture). To have any realistic chance of countering this will require a serious recovery of the Christian view of sexuality, which requires even more fundamentally a substantive Christian view of human persons and their place in the great drama of creation and redemption. In short, that will require that we persuasively teach Christian morality as an integral component of the entire Christian vision of reality. And we must convey the beauty and goodness of this vision, and how it conduces to human flourishing, as vigorously as we argue for its truth. But nothing short of that has any real hope of bringing genuine renewal in the realm of sexual morality.

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Justin Taylor has a lovely post here summarizing what we might learn about Christian friendship from the correspondence of Esther Edwards Burr (1732-1758), Jonathan Edwards’ daughter and Aaron Burr’s mother, with her friend Sarah Prince.

An excerpt:

Modern readers are sometimes taken aback by the way in which same-sex friendships were described with passionate expression usually reserved for lovers. Our fear of homoerotic overtones has almost entirely muted this sort of language today. But it was common in Puritan New England and continued at least into the late nineteenth century, applying not only to friendships between women but also friendships between men.

For example, Esther describes how excited she would become at the arrival of a new letter from her friend: “I could not help weeping for joy to hear once more from my dear, very dear Fidelia. . . . I broke it open with [as] much eagerness as ever a fond lover imbraced the dearest joy and dlight of his soul” (March 7, 1755).

She felt similarly after having read the letter itself: “Every Letter I have from you raises my esteem of you and increases my love to you—their is the very soul of a friend in all you write—You cant think how those private papers make me long to see you” (Letter No. 21, April 16, 1756).

Esther even wonders at times if her love for Sarah is bordering on idolatry, becoming too attached to things of this earth: “As you say, I believe tis true that I love you too much, that is I am too fond of you, but I cant esteem and value too greatly, that is sertain—Consider my friend how rare a thing tis to meet with such a friend as I have in my Fidelia—Who would not value and prize such a friendship above gold, or honour, or any thing that the World can afford? . . . I am trying to be weaned from you my dear, and all other dear friends, but for the present it seems vain—I seem more attached to ‘em than ever— . . .” (June 4, 1755). She sees friendship as one of life’s greatest earthly goods, though less than God.

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Jonathan Rauch’s brief memoir, Denial: My Twenty-Five Years Without a Soul, published recently as a Kindle Single, describes how powerful it can be to find that your previous unnamable self has a place. For much of the story’s first half, Rauch tells about trying to interpret his same-sex attraction as “envy.” He would admire the muscles of his friends and tell himself that that admiration was his longing, as a bookish, skinny kid, to have the same kind of body. But as the story finishes, he realizes that was dissembling: “I had resisted imagining myself as a homosexual or even imagining that it might be possible for me to be a homosexual, because I had supposed that to be a homosexual is to lose any possibility of a normal life.”

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.

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In his warmly pastoral Friends in Christ: Paths to a New Understanding of Church, Brother John of Taizé discusses the rise of monasticism as a response to Scriptural injunctions to brotherly love. Monasticism, in this account, was the place where a uniquely Christian theology of friendship came into its own. But monastic orders were also the places where the unique dangers of friendship became apparent: “Within a community, human friendships, notably among brothers or sisters with little experience of the spiritual life, could easily have a divisive effect on the whole body, leading to the formation of cliques or factions, even if of only two members.” Anyone who has spent time in Christian communities of whatever variety knows what he means.

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I’ve been rereading Josef Pieper’s lovely little exposition of Aquinas on hope, and it strikes me as being very much in line with the point I was trying to make in my last post that quoted Vaclav Havel.

Pieper writes: “The concept of the status viatoris is one of the basic concepts of every Christian rule of life. To be a ‘viator’ means ‘one on the way.’ The status viatoris is, then, the ‘condition or state of being on the way.’ Its proper antonym is status comprehensoris. One who has comprehended, encompassed, arrived, is no longer a viator, but acomprehensor.”

Following Aquinas, Pieper places hope in between the vices of both despair and presumption, and this seems to me to offer those of us who are gay and Christian a useful opportunity to pause and evaluate the way that we conceive of our own “station” on the way.

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If friendship needs to be seen afresh in our time as an intimate love in its own right, distinct from the love of spouses or romantic partners, then we need stories of friendship that show us how its rediscovery is possible. I’m always on the lookout for such stories, and I just finished reading one of the best I’ve encountered in some time, Gail Caldwell’s Let’s Take the Long Way Home: A Memoir of Friendship.

Published a couple of years ago, Caldwell’s book narrates her friendship with a fellow writer, Caroline Knapp. The two women met in middle age, both of them unmarried at the time. They quickly discovered they both shared love of dogs and the outdoors, and some of the most artful prose of the book describes Caldwell and Knapp’s frequent rowing on a lake near their respective homes and their walks in the adjacent woods. Eventually, their friendship led to deeper intimacies and a mutual disclosure of their drinking histories. Both women were sober when they became friends, but their past addictions cemented their sense of solidarity with one another. (Caldwell’s description of the spiral into addiction is unblinking and one of the real gifts of this book.)

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