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Apologia Report 20:6 (1,235)
February 11, 2015
Subject: What is the Christian attitude toward homosexuality?
In this issue:
HOMOSEXUALITY - Time magazine thrills at discovering the "evangelical war over gay marriage"
+ why the real problem "is not from gays openly living the gay lifestyle while still claiming to be Christians"
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HOMOSEXUALITY
"A Change of Heart: Inside the Evangelical war over gay marriage" by Elizabeth Dias -- reports that EastLake Community Church in Seattle <eastlakecc.com> is "quietly coming out as one of the first openly LGBT-affirming evangelical churches in the U.S. ... The church's first gay wedding took place last month. Pastor Ryan Meeks, 36, regularly preaches an unusual brand of evangelicalism.... A turning point came when he realized one of his staffers had been afraid to tell him she was dating a woman. ...
"The overall public has favored gay marriage for three years."Dias adds that "evangelical churches and their congregations typically remain opposed, though that opposition is weakening. ... Support among the oldest evangelicals grew from 1 in 20 in 2003 to 1 in 5 in 2014. But the fastest change can be found among younger evangelicals, whose support for gay marriage jumped from 20% in 2003 to 42% in 2014. And that is a shift that is uprooting everything. ...
"In many evangelical communities, the Bible itself is on trial. A new generation is rejecting the culture-warrior tone that gave evangelicals outsize political power during the past three decades. ...
"It's not surprising that EastLake is an early adopter. Seattle has a higher percentage of gay-couple households than SanFrancisco - 1 in 17 couples living together in the city is gay. Nearly all of Meeks' 30 staff members are under the age of 35 and plugged in to cultural shifts. But theologically, it is daring. If evangelicalism is famous for anything, it is opposition to homosexuality. ...
"Consider the Reformation Project <www.reformationproject.org>, a Wichita, Kans.-based effort by 24-year-old gay evangelical activist Matthew Vines to raise up LGBT-affirming voices in every evangelical church in the country. To reach that goal, he is training reformers in batches of 40 to 50 at regional leadership workshops who can go back to their home churches and serve as advocates for LGBT inclusion. The Reformation Project has staffers in three states, representatives in 25 more and plans for a presence in all 50 states by 2018.
"At the group's conference in Washington, D.C., in early November, some 300 people came from some of the country's largest megachurches, including McLean Bible in Virginia, Redeemer Presbyterian in New York City and North Point Ministries in Atlanta. His funding has grown from $300,000 in 2014 to a projected $1.2 million in 2015, with help from furniture mogul Mitchell Gold, a secular Jew who is working toward evangelical change. ...
"Evangelicals for Marriage Equality <www.evangelicals4equality .com>, a group founded by two millennials in D.C., whose national spokesperson is a 22-year-old named Brandan Robertson, is planning to take its message to Christian college campuses this year, encouraging evangelicals to support civil marriage if not church-sanctioned marriage. The Gay Christian Network's Justin Lee <www.gaychristian.net>, 37, hosted his 11th annual conference this month in Portland, Ore., and attendance swelled to 1,400, double the size of last year's. (Lee's friendship with Alan Chambers, former president of the controversial Exodus International ministry, which claimed to cure gays of homosexuality, helped prompt Chambers to publicly apologize for the hurt Exodus has caused, and the group shut down. ...
"When Evangelicals for Marriage Equality launched in September, three prominent evangelical magazines - Christianity Today, Relevant, and World - did not let the group buy advertising in their pages. ...
"Illinois's Wheaton College, Billy Graham's alma mater, does not recognize alumni gay marriages, but this fall it hired a celibate lesbian to work in its chaplain's office. Last spring, some 100 students protested when the school invited Rosaria Butterfield, a former lesbian now married to a male pastor, to speak on campus. ...
"Much of the action is taking place behind closed doors. ... Andy Stanley of Atlanta's North Point Community Church spoke at a conference about how to love middle-schoolers when they are in the process of coming out. ...
"For many evangelicals, the marriage debate isn't really about marriage or families or sex - it is about the Bible itself. ...
"So far no Christian tradition has been able to embrace the LGBT community without first changing its views about women. The same reasoning that concludes that homosexuality is sin is also behind the traditional evangelical view that husbands are the spiritual leaders of marriages and men are the leaders in church. It is one reason gay men have an easier time as evangelical reformers. ...
"And as evangelicals can no longer count on American culture to support their one-man-one-woman sexual ethic, they are waging a more heated battle for religious liberty. ...
"Evangelicals are also turning to unusual partners to strengthen their reserves in the one-man-one-woman fight: the Vatican and the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. ... LDS president Henry Eyring [who was invited] to speak at a first-ever interfaith [Vatican] colloquium on the 'Complementarity of Man and Woman' <www.humanum.it/en/about>....
"The risks are high, and rejection has real consequences. Seattle's EastLake has lost 22% of its income and 800 attendees in the past 18 months, and it anticipates that those numbers may continue to climb. ...
"The evangelical reformers know the fight is just beginning. ... Even at Vines' Reformation Project conference, most of the panelists advocating change were not evangelical but from the mainline Protestant traditions."
Dias concludes with a description of "nearly 350 conservative evangelical moms of gay and lesbian children nation wide [in a private Facebook group trying] to reconcile their faith with their love for their children. ... The group has spawned two other private support groups, one for moms with transgender kids and one for moms who have worked through the biblical questions and are ready to advocate for their child in their communities. ...
"'Every positive reforming movement in church history is first labeled heresy,' Meeks says. 'Evangelicalism is way behind on this. We have a debt to pay.'" Time, Jan 26 '15, pp44-48.
On the GetReligion blog, Bobby Ross Jr. concludes his analysis of Time's article ("News vs. advocacy") by saying: "Anyone looking for real journalism will figure out in a hurry that this story isn't it."<www.goo.gl/FQbb5R>
What is the experience of evangelical churches facing this challenge? What problems arise? In "Gay Christians? The Grave Danger Coming Out Poses to Christian Churches," Brian Patrick Mitchell <brianpatrickmitchell.com> begins: "Conflict makes people uncomfortable, so in mixed company, people watch what they say. Instead of speaking their minds on controversial issues, they trim their opinions to fit those around them - sometimes out of charity, sometimes out of prudence, but often out of cowardice. "Gays count on cowardice when they 'come out.' They know that announcing themselves as gay will silence most objections to gayness. The person who comes out dares others to disagree with him on the matter, challenging them to either accept him as gay or make him their enemy. Not surprisingly, the closer one is to someone who comes out, the harder it is to maintain one's disapproval of homosexuality. ...
"The greater danger is not from gays openly living the gay lifestyle while still claiming to be Christians. ... The greater danger is from Christians who profess to be both 'gay' and chaste - Christians who openly identify themselves as 'gay' on account of their attraction to members of their own sex, yet who accept their churches' condemnation of homosexual relations as sinful. ...
"Make no mistake: 'coming out' does not mean confiding one's struggle against same-sex attraction in a close friend or pastor; it means openly declaring one's orientation to effect a fundamental change in one's church. [The] openly 'gay' Christians present churches with extremely difficult problems of both faith and discipline - problems that have lately tended to undermine the faithfulness of whole communions."
Mitchell begins by examining the expression "gay Christian." He concludes by writing that "'Gay Christian' makes no more sense than 'adulterous Christian.' Such terms rankle Christian ears because no one is being a Christian when he lusts after another man or someone other than his wife."
After this, Mitchell calls attention to the attack that heterosexuality has experienced along with the increased focus on homosexuality. In the process, he notes that "Christianity's insistence on heterosexuality and condemnation of homosexuality as unnatural in all forms was a major change in the sexual ethics of the ancient world, as Kyle Harper shows in From Shame to Sin: The Christian Transformation of Sexual Morality in Late Antiquity." [1] In discussing the "right governance of sexuality," Mitchell argues that heterosexuality is not "just the opposite of homosexuality but also the opposite of feminism."
Under the heading "The Challenge of Coming Out," Mitchell writes: "Today's 'gay Christians' defy this biblical and traditional Christian order when they 'come out' and publicly profess their homosexuality, as if the old man were who they really are, as if change were not possible, as if Christ could not heal as if they could not still marry and have children, and as if others were wrong to expect them to conform to heterosexual norms distinguishing the sexes in so many ways. ...
"[P]ublic acceptance of the immutability of their sexual identity is just what many 'gay Christians' seek from other Christians. ... "The truth is that even adults who have fully embraced an unchaste gay lifestyle can and do sometimes change enough to live happy heterosexual lives, but the hope of such healing gets short shrift in the chaste-gay narrative."
Mitchell concludes: "It takes perhaps a generation for a compete moral inversion to take place. You can't keep what you won't teach. Older members, taught that heterosexuality is normal and that homosexuality is sinful, will give way in time to younger members, who have never heard homosexuality condemned in church, who instead have been taught by the world to hate the 'haters' who condemn it, and who therefore will 'think they do God service' when they persecute the faithful for bearing witnes against wickedness." Touchstone, Jan/Feb '15, pp31-37.
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SOURCES: Monographs
1 - From Shame to Sin: The Christian Transformation of Sexual Morality in Late Antiquity, by Kyle Harper (Harvard Univ Prs, 2013, hardcover, 316 pages) <www.goo.gl/LRF4KB>
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