Going Public, Part 2

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The first post in this series briefly explained some of the potential dangers and pitfalls of writing openly about that bewildering intersection of my faith and homosexuality. I’m here again, so apparently I did a terrible job of dissuading myself.

This post will focus on a few of the reasons why I believe the good that can come from being fully “out” overwhelms any fears or negative responses, and compels me toward a life of openness.

So.

Pros: On a personal level, not having to cover up my sexuality is a blessing. Or, stated more profoundly, not having to hide the full breadth of the grace of God in my life is tremendously freeing. If my testimony is the story of how I have come to know God more intimately and powerfully, then integral to that witness is his process of bringing an intensely confused and hurting son of his from the depths of denial about his sexuality to a place where he feels increasingly reconciled to himself, where he is surrounded by friends and mentors who form a rich community of laughter and rest, and where he can say – and this is no small thing – that he knows he is loved and that he knows he is worthy of love.

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Finding Meaning in God’s Calling

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Teaching Philosophy of Religion and Philosophy of the Human Person sometimes leads to interesting class discussions, where students’ engagement with some important philosophical text intermingles with concerns about the ultimate meaning of their own lives.

In these conversations, two important themes often emerge: “what will I do with my life?” And: “who will I love?”

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Going Public, Part 1

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If you had asked me four years ago whether or not I’d consider writing publicly about my experience as an evangelical Christian guy who is attracted to other guys, I’m not sure what I would have done—except maybe stare at you awkwardly for ten seconds then leap into the nearest hedge and try to escape.

I had just begun to acknowledge and wrestle with the fact that I really wasn’t anywhere close to being straight, that the feelings I experienced in the pit of my stomach whenever I saw him (which felt nothing like butterflies and everything like an explosion of spastic badgers) actually meant something that I should have understood long, long before, but didn’t. But couldn’t. I was afraid and deeply ashamed.

Now, however, if you would ask me the same question I’d be all “I can’t talk to you right now, I’m busy writing publicly about my experience as an evangelical Christian guy who is attracted to other guys.”

So things have changed.

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The older, more respectable sibling of gay pride

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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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What Does Same-Sex Marriage Mean for the Single, Straight Christian?

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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 on homosexuality and fornication

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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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Condemnation, Forgiveness, and New Life

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Debates about Christian sexual ethics, and particularly debates dealing with homosexuality, are often difficult and sometimes counterproductive: the argument may do more to alienate the audience from the Church and the Christian understanding of sex than to draw them to Christ.

I want to begin my meditations on how Christians should understand and respond to contemporary debates about human sexuality with the story of the woman taken in adultery (John 8:3-11).

3 The scribes and the Pharisees brought a woman who had been caught in adultery, and placing her in the midst 4 they said to him, “Teacher, this woman has been caught in the act of adultery. 5 Now in the law Moses commanded us to stone such. What do you say about her?” 6 This they said to test him, that they might have some charge to bring against him. Jesus bent down and wrote with his finger on the ground. 7 And as they continued to ask him, he stood up and said to them, “Let him who is without sin among you be the first to throw a stone at her.” 8 And once more he bent down and wrote with his finger on the ground. 9 But when they heard it, they went away, one by one, beginning with the eldest, and Jesus was left alone with the woman standing before him. 10 Jesus looked up and said to her, “Woman, where are they? Has no one condemned you?” 11 She said, “No one, Lord.” And Jesus said, “Neither do I condemn you; go, and do not sin again.”

1. The first point to notice here is that the woman was caught in the act of adultery. If she was caught in the act, a man was caught with her. Yet the scribes and Pharisees did not bring him to Jesus. Only the woman was brought to judgment.

Sexual sins are almost never treated equally, and never have been: there are some people, and some sexual sins, which are treated as sins on paper, but excused in practice. Men’s sexual sins are almost always more socially tolerated than the same sins by women. A man who has premarital sex is only “sowing his wild oats”; a woman who does the same is a “slut” or worse. (Notably, however, this is reversed for homosexuals: sex between men is far more stigmatized than sex between women in most cultures that I am aware of.)

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How Do Bodies Matter?

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In the most recent issue of Christianity Today, Andy Crouch has an excellent editorial on the church’s future and matters LGBTQIA. Please do read the whole thing. He writes,

There is really only one conviction that can hold this coalition of disparate human experiences [i.e., the experiences captured under the label LGBTQIA] together. And it is the irrelevance of bodies—specifically, the irrelevance of biological sexual differentiation in how we use our bodies.

What unites the LGBTQIA coalition is a conviction that human beings are not created male and female in any essential or important way. What matters is not one’s body but one’s heart—the seat of human will and desire, which only its owner can know.

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Homosexuality and the development of doctrine

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For almost 20 centuries, there was little controversy over Christian teaching about homosexuality. For the last few decades, there has been an extraordinary amount of controversy. How should Christians respond to this changing situation?

In a helpful recent blog post, Christopher Damian draws on the ideas of John Henry Newman to explore how Church teaching on abortion has developed in the past, and how the teaching on homosexuality may develop in the future. The object here is not to argue for a revision of Church teaching to bring it into line with the fashions of contemporary culture. Rather, authentic doctrinal development leads to a deeper understanding of the unchanging deposit of Christian faith.

I wrote about similar ideas of doctrinal development last fall on Spiritual Friendship. As I am currently working on a series of posts which will, I hope, develop the orthodox teaching of the Church in a more pastorally fruitful direction, I thought I would begin with a reminder of some of my thoughts on doctrinal development from last fall. (Apologies for those for whom this is a repeat.)

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After Exodus, What?

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Here are a few preliminary thoughts and questions about the recent announcement that Exodus International, the largest and most influential of the so-called “ex-gay” ministries, will be closing its doors:

1. Like many younger people who are Christian and gay, I have shied away from much of what flies under the banner of Exodus and its affiliates. I was never involved in an Exodus group of any sort, in part because so many of their public statements led me to believe they were addressing themselves to people with rather different histories than mine. When I heard ex-gay accounts of the origins of same-sex attraction—accounts that focused on absentee or distant fathers or failure to bond with same-sex peers in childhood—I realized I was hearing stories that were pretty removed from my experience. I was raised in a very loving two-parent family, and the “father wound” narrative never illumined the possible causes of my homosexuality as it seemed to do for others. And I discerned, however inchoately, however rightly or wrongly, that if I were to join up with an “ex-gay” ministry, I would feel some degree of pressure to conform my narrative to theirs. (The anonymous blogger Disputed Mutability has described that pressure in detail here, and I’d encourage you to read her excellent post along with this one by Melinda Selmys.)

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