Question #6: Why is Homosexuality a Political Issue for the Church?
Homosexuality matters to the modern church in part because it is an easily defined target when more complicated issues such as living well beneath our means so that we can share with those less fortunate than we are, is wholly against the American Dream. Because Christianity has fully embraced the ideal of American opulence, it can not stand for that which defines it and must instead seek out positions that are easier to work people up about and less likely to convict them of their need to change their underlying disposition to life.
Question 6: Why is Homosexuality a Political Issue?
Homosexuality is the theological shell game of the past ten years and will probably serve as a barometer of the church’s growing irrelevancy in the next ten. The issue serves as a substitute for religion’s own lack of spiritual impact with its own people, religion’s inability to change hearts and motives, and its inability to develop theologies consistent with what scientific and philosophical reason has taught us about our world. Before you think that my emphasis on homosexuality being a substitute issue for much more problematic and complex fears within Christianity, ask yourself what the following quotes suggest:
“What can we do about this snowballing battle with the homosexual community? We Christians need to take some form of action soon, for since verbal protesting is not allowed, soon many heterosexuals will be moved to the point of physical aggression. It is crucial to stop the homoerotic teaching in the sex education classes so that the future generation of adults won’t be encouraged to imitate such a lifestyle … Most importantly, though, we must cease to remain passive, allowing wickedness to seep openly into society and become more entrenched in our culture. We must begin to intercede for a nation on the brink of judgment and destruction as a result of Babylonian practices, and pray for wisdom on how to biblically reform our society, preserving its strong roots of moral values anchored in the rich soil of Christianity.” (emphasis mine)
Source: R2R Ministries
“Does the Republican Party want our votes, no strings attached–to court us every two years, and then to say, ‘Don’t call me; I’ll call you’–and to not care about the moral law of the universe?…Is that what they want? Is that the way the system works? Is this the way it’s going to be? If it is, I’m gone, and if I go, I will do everything I can to take as many people with me as possible.” (Statement from 2/7/98 Council for National Policy meeting, Wash. Times 2/17/98)
James Dobson - Focus on the Family
The fifth question about homosexuality I wrestled with touched on the role politics plays over gay and lesbian issues. Perhaps necessarily so, my thoughts on the sixth question - why is homosexuality a political issue - will repeat some of the same points touched on in the last essay; however, the root cause of why homosexuality plays such a central role within contemporary political debate is worthy of additional time and attention. In short, I would suggest that homosexuality is such a political issue because contemporary Christianity is about belief in action only to the extent that the emphasis is conformity to orthodoxy, not about the more difficult elements within Christian ethics such as grace, mercy, forgiveness and love. Today’s Christianity is politically active because it has lost its way and become about positions you hold on particular issues, not reformation of the heart. Religion is always at its most dangerous when it forgets its proper place and begins to fixate on political solutions to spiritual questions, or religious answers to questions best answered by science or secularism.
Homosexuality matters to the modern church in part because it is an easily defined target when more complicated issues such as living well beneath our means so that we can share with those less fortunate than we are, is wholly against the American Dream. Because Christianity has fully embraced the ideal of American opulence, it can not stand for that which defines it and must instead seek out positions that are easier to work people up about and less likely to convict them of their need to change their underlying disposition to life. Modern Christendom has become about conformity to the ideal of consumerism, a belief that values, elevates, and enforces sameness. Today’s Christian ethic is not about salvation by sacrifice, it is about salvation through sameness. Because homosexuality is intrinsically different physically than heterosexuality, it represents a challenge to that which Christianity currently values - conformity. Why is conformity so critical? Because in an increasingly complex world, that which is different is both that which is most threatening and what is easiest to identify. If it can be easily identified it can be more easily rooted out, as opposed to questions that pose much greater degrees of complexity and require real nuanced debate to resolve. In addition, because it can be easily identified it can be scapegoated. Confusing times often result in leaders who pander to their constituents in the form of greatly reduced simplicities being used to substitute for problems that are outside the leaders’ grasp to solve.
What separates Christians from non-believers? Underneath this seemingly obvious question is the greater difficulty of what separates zealot Christians from zealous Muslims? What separates their fundamentalists from ours? On the other end of the spectrum, what separates a gracious Christian from a gracious Muslim? What is fundamentally unique about Christianity other than its orthodoxy? What separates Christians from non-Christians seems to be conformity to certain cultural norms and tightly held beliefs; these are what define Christianity today, not a fundamentally different salvific outworking of God’s grace in their lives. While this is most damning to Christianity long-term (as it has been and continues to be in Europe), what is quite disconcerting is to see the extent to which today’s Christianity has moved from believing that its place is in the hearts of its followers to the belief that its place is within the politics of a particular issue. This has never boded well for religion as it is a harbinger of religion becoming a part of the political problem, not a part of reaching hearts with the message of selflessness that secularism can never provide. Christianity is lost. It believes today that its place is to argue for political solutions to what it admits it sees as spiritual problems - an illogic born of its frustration at admitting its own irrelevancy to its own people. Christianity’s emphasis on politics is an implicit acknowledgement that it does not understand how to impact people’s lives, and must instead impact their cultural identity and political positions as it does not know how to reach their hearts.
It is so much easier to incite people’s emotion over the idea that their Christian America is being robbed by wicked judges out to take away the ideals of the Founding Fathers than it is to emphasize the love and grace a Christian must have towards those he disagrees with. Politics is an ugly game, but compared to real reformation of the heart, it is a walk in the park.
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3 Responses to “Question #6: Why is Homosexuality a Political Issue for the Church?”
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May 4th, 2005 at 11:07 pm
Dear Ben,
You wrote:
“It is so much easier to incite people’s emotion over the idea that their Christian America is being robbed by wicked judges out to take away the ideals of the Founding Fathers than it is to emphasize the love and grace a Christian must have towards those he disagrees with. Politics is an ugly game, but compared to real reformation of the heart, it is a walk in the park.”
No one could have put it better… nothing disgusts me more than hypocrisy; and we continually see the number of self-righteous and judgemental hypocrites grow…
Best Regards,
Melinda
May 5th, 2005 at 11:20 am
Ben,
I appreciate your thoughts on this issue. The church has always struggled with pointing its fingers at only certain types of issues and considering them the “unforgiveable sin.” 20-30 yrs ago, it was divorce, before that, it was adultery (”The Scarlet letter” is a good example of this). For sure, homosexuality, if we believe that the Bible states that it is wrong, is something we should be opposed to, but how we go about saying that or proclaiming that is one thing. As people in America, however we do have to be aware that the Gay/Lesbian Agenda is HUGE. Just consider the amount of time it took between Ellen Degeneres’ infamous “coming out of closet” on TV (and all the scandal it made) and when “Will and Grace” became the number 1 show on TV was less than 2yrs. In other words - homosexuality is not just a political issue for Christians, there are many other people who have made it a large money-consuming agenda.
However, the issue of Christians in politics is an altogether different question that requires us to take a closer look. Should Christians use politics to damn homosexuals and quarantine them off as the enemy of all our ideals? Certainly not. But it must also be remembered that it is the role of the Christian to have an influence on its society and its culture. Slavery in England never would have come about without the two decades of work the Christian, William Wilberforce, spent in Parliament.
When I was in Kenya last fall, a country that is about 80% Christian yet has one of the top 5 most corrupt gov’ts in the world, I spoke with a man whose church was trying to send out just as many godly Christians into the political arena as they were in missions. Obviously, this is somewhat of a different situation trying to address very different issues (issues relating much closer to justice, laundering money that was supposed to go to the poor, etc). Ed Dobson, a man who formerly worked with Jerry Falwell in the “religious right” and pastor in Grand Rapids, got so sick of the “Christian-less” aspects of the organization that he left. Rather than ranting against homosexuals, he has decided to make his church a safe haven for people with AIDS, and he regularly visits homes where men with AIDS are dying.
All this to say - somewhere in here we have to wrestle between our call to influence our culture through politics, administering justice, etc and our call to influence our culture simply through a lifestyle of love, service, mercy, and so on.
Thanks for reading,
Brock
PS - I am an acquaintance with your dad (though several decades younger) who gave me the URL to your site.
May 6th, 2005 at 6:22 pm
Brock - Welcome to MysteriousFaith! In your response I see your very sincere desire to be gracious while holding to your belief that homosexuality is wrong. It is important that you know I recognize that is not a fine line to walk and a line whose walking is not always appreciated by evangelicals. All of that having been said, I am not an evangelical and hold to different ideas as to authority than what your position probably entails. Because in general I do not hold to what I call the transcription method of Holy Scripture (from God’s mouth to man’s ear) I believe we have to wrestle with what is of God and what is of man. Within any discussion on homosexuality an evangelical is bound to find symmetry between a suspicion that homosexuality may not be “wrong” and the obvious Biblical passages which state otherwise. Dear Christians such as John Boswell have attempted to define even finer lines about what the first century apostlic church would have understood about homosexuality, all in the hopes of accomodating both the traditional view of inspiration of Scripture and the needs of their homosexual family and friends.
In my first essay on the topic of homosexuality I made an effort to address what I see as the primary difficulty in Christian discussion on the issue: separating abberant homosexual behavior from healthy homosexual behavior. By the latter I mean those same-sex relationships that focus on relationship, spiritual intimacy and commitment. I see little emphasis in Christian evangelical thinking on what it means to accept that people are born with a certain sexual orientation and then must stifle their passions for life; Paul’s comments about sexual urges and his advice that it is better to marry than burn carry no weight here, but they should.
Your comments begin with the idea that there is some gay agenda that is HUGE (your emphasis, not mine!). I am unclear as to what this agenda might be other than not being discriminated against. Would you have us believe that Will & Grace is popular because it is homosexual? It is popular because it is well done. The fact that it has two characters that are gay is secondary to the primary reality that it is well done. One of the characters is, in my opinion, an unproductive stereotype of homosexuality that does not serve the purpose of normalizing them - something your comments accuse the show of. If authors, poets, politicians, entertainers or scholars want to be accepted for something they hold was their birth-rite, then the point of refusal you have to rely on is that Scripture says homosexuality is wrong.
I agree with you. Scripture does say it is wrong. I make no effort to argue that the Romans passage references pederastry over “normative” homosexuality. I don’t feel we need to make that effort as my view of Scripture allows us to wrestle with what modernity teaches us. In my reading, study and personal experience I have seen healthy homosexuals. I have seen sick homosexuals and without exception can state that the latter are the result of not being accepted for something they were born into. Grace means more than tolerance, not less. Grace means helping people cope, which is fundamentally different than saying you are born gay and must suffer in silence. I appreciate your comments and please, write back as you feel led to.