Selective Reasoning in Churches
A few weeks ago, I visited a small rural Kentucky city where my daughter attends college. Since she hadn’t yet selected a church, I tried to help her identify several nearby fellowships that she might be comfortable attending. Most of the local churches seemed quite traditional in various ways, ranging from liturgical to fundamentalist. I am theologically conservative. As a specialist in Christian cultural movements I am comfortable worshipping in various settings. I avoid referring people to churches where scripture is not considered authoritative, although these days I focus more on praxis than on theology, since talk can be cheap. That morning, we picked a church that had been established for less than twenty years, hoping that its contemporary worship style and non-denominational expression of the faith might be appealing.
Perhaps eighty people met in a very nice building. I counted 52 in the worship center, including us. No one greeted us, but a designated agent unenthusiastically pointed us to the coffee. We were handed a two-page statement of faith. The first eleven points summarized orthodox views, each in two to four sentences, with abundant scriptural references. The statement on the divinity of Jesus had five subpoints. I examined point number twelve, which began with “We believe that marriage is sanctioned by God, which joins one man and one woman in a single, exclusive union, as delineated in scripture…” We didn’t disagree. But this was followed by a long screed—twelve lines in length rather than the 2-3 lines afforded to each of the other doctrines. In it, the church highlighted its opposition to several sexual practices, including incest and bestiality. As a visitor, I could immediately identify their passions, and I wondered why they felt the need to mention them right at the opening bell.
The screed was followed by a final, four-line statement declaring that they ALSO believed in love, compassion, kindness and respect, with the clarification that they didn’t believe in harassing anybody. Fair enough. Why, then, spill so much ink on the habits they found MOST repugnant? I didn’t see any rebuke of the greed, the violence, the envy, the vitriol, the rampant materialism, gluttony, or slothfulness that more profoundly characterizes much of our American culture than the sexual practices of others.
The sermon followed a similar pattern. The pastor used a passage about the authority of God’s word, with which we agreed, but he never smiled or explained it in detail. Rather, he pivoted to talking about sexual practices with which he disagreed and questioned whether congregants should be reading novels or engaging in other entertainment when they could be reading the Bible more extensively, which I imagine should have occupied countless daily hours.
After the service, the congregation was as indifferent to the strangers among them as when we arrived, with only one or two making any effort to greet us. I had come to guide my daughter in her spiritual journey, not to criticize, but these impressions are the authentic observations of a first-time visitor. The lengthy statement about sexual practices made me consider they were preemptively flying a red flag, keeping the “wrong people” at bay to ensure they wouldn’t return or attempt to settle into the congregation. I wondered, with a chuckle, if the church could recommend where all the pro-bestiality and pro-incest visitors might worship, in addition to the gays.
A Conservative Theological Perspective
We can’t be all things to all people, and some of my friends inevitably are disappointed when they learn of my belief that homosexuality is an errant practice. My reasoning is not based on the Torah, which contains enough prohibitions to condemn precisely every person on earth. I merely turn to the first chapter of Romans, wherein Paul makes an argument in verses 26-28 based on the natural order that, to me, is irrefutable. Humanity was meant to follow a natural order, for which our bodies were designed, in sexual matters as well as in other areas. This is clear to me after many years of studying scripture, and when I have considered contrary arguments, the Biblical evidence has been compelling. As a Christ-follower, I embrace conservative scholarship and reason—using sound hermeneutical principles and then contextualizing scripture for contemporary application. My obligation is to attempt to interpret it honestly, without spin. I am not concerned with pitting one sinful practice against another; my passion is for helping people be reconciled to Christ.
Elevating Homosexuality to Super-Sin Status
Homosexuality, therefore, has never topped the list of subjects I felt compelled to illuminate. I recognize that I am in the minority compared to what I have observed among evangelicals and other theological conservatives. The latter appear to have elevated this practice to the level of some kind of “super-sin” requiring special condemnation, matched only in contempt by the sin of abortion. I recently sat in a concert next to a man who identified himself as an independent Baptist pastor from Tennessee, who, like the pastor of the church I described earlier, also seemed to conjure the topic ex nihilo. “Some churches are so lenient today,” he remarked, “…that they won’t even bother to warn the gays, all of whom are condemned to hell without the possibility of redemption.”
That’s a little harsh, I thought. Not one of them will be redeemed? And yet, Christians who habitually lie as part of their business practices, Christians engaged in materialistic and self-centered practices, Christians who ignore the impoverished in their communities, those who treat their neighbors shabbily, unmarried Christians who “slip” into heterosexual sins, those who look at pornography, Christians who actively hate the immigrants in their communities, those who treat gay people as if they were Satan’s special class—people like my new pastor friend, perhaps—those people are eternally redeemed if they have made a “profession” of faith or answered an altar call? They will be saved, but the entirety of the LGBTQ crowd will be damned?
All Sin is Problematic
Since the late 1970s, I have pastored and counseled professionally, and I have been continually active in one church or another. One concern that began to weigh on me about twenty years ago was the revelation that numerous single people in the churches I attended had been sleeping around outside of the covenant of marriage, and that the majority of men proclaiming to be Christians are consumers of pornography. Yet, I have witnessed very little hand-wringing over these phenomena.
A few years back, a man stood up to make an excited proclamation to our congregation. “Me and Theresa have decided we’re going to get married.” They had been worshipping in the pew in front of me for three years, along with their children. Numerous kudos were shouted from within the congregation, but I simply froze. All these years, you have been sitting in this congregation, volunteering in activities, breaking bread with us, and you weren’t married? It took you all this time, hearing the Gospel weekly, to be convicted about this? I had always presumed they were a married couple.
Deferring to our Our Pet Sins
In my church-going history, I have observed people who were so materialistic they nearly bankrupted their families trying to maintain houses larger than they could afford, running up unimaginable credit card debt. I’ve known Christians so obsessed with sports teams that they would never consider missing a game. I have watched people become more passionate about their political party’s goals than about the Gospel. I have heard men confess their pornography habits, curse their co-workers, marginalize anyone who doesn’t vote the same way they do, and disparage people who were not native-born. Many have expressed incredulity and even mockery when I have counseled them to practice celibacy, citing my personal success at having practiced it from the time of my conversion until the night of my honeymoon. I discovered that most of these congregants are disproportionately angry with the sins of queer and transgender people, and of women who have had abortions. In other words, they have focused on the sins of others, but rarely on their own. They have classified the LGBTQ community as being beyond the boundaries of grace. While they are sometimes troubled by their own sins, it has been rare to find a person who worries that the evil embodied in their own thoughts, words, and actions has led them to abide in a relationship divorced from God’s redemption.
I’m OK, You’re Not OK
I call this the “I’m okay, you’re not okay” syndrome. Like society in general, my church families have generally been adept at “othering” those they find particularly reprehensible, without recognizing their own participation in habitual sin. If they can point to a group of “others” who are demonstrably more reprehensible than they are, this gives the illusion that the sins they commit are not so heinous. They can’t fathom how the hatred in their own hearts, the consumerism, selfishness and idolatry they daily practice could somehow be as problematic as homosexuality.
Too Comfortable with our Aberrations
Yet, just as a queer person might be entrenched in her lifestyle to the extent she doesn’t recognize it as aberrant, my church friends seem not to be convicted of the entrenched natures of their own sins, either. My own spiritual formation in the Spirit of Christ has developed and endured over several decades, allowing deeply entrenched sinfulness to be continually revealed to me. I have been redeemed by God’s grace, forgiven of my sins, but repentance remains necessary on an ongoing basis if I am to be of any use to God’s Kingdom. The hatred, envy, pettiness, gluttony and lust I continued to grapple with even after years of perceived spirit-led living have been strong foils to illusions of self-righteousness. Can I really say that I am a “former” sinner when I continue to identify morally problematic thoughts channeling through my mind daily? How can I minimize feelings of contempt for other people, knowing that hatred is the seed of murder? Aware that the Great Commandment is focused upon epic, remarkable love- both towards God and towards those “others” mentioned earlier—how can I be justified in viewing my sins as somehow superior to queerness?
In the third chapter of Colossians, the Apostle Paul instructs us to “Put to death the sinful, earthly things lurking within you. Have nothing to do with sexual immorality, impurity, lust, and evil desires.” In verses 5-9, he painstakingly enumerates the substance of these behaviors. The phenomenon of slaying our sinful tendencies cannot be accomplished merely by human effort, although our efforts are clearly required to work in tandem with available divine assistance. Paul offers more specificity in verse 10: “Put on your new nature, and be renewed as you learn to know your Creator and become like him.” Sadly, the cheap grace permeating the American church appears to have impeded my American Christian friends from establishing this as a daily practice. They have grown weak and lethargic, abandoning the battle of guarding their hearts and minds. This is something that the gays need to practice, they seem to think. It isn’t relevant to me, you have to understand, because my group and I cleaned up long ago.
Adopting Humility to Gain an Audience
I wish I had better resolutions for reaching unbelievers in the gay community, as this issue has affected people I love. Many in their communities are particularly hardened towards the gospel due to the words and behaviors of conservative Christians. I also continue to be convinced that queer communities are not okay with yielding to practices they wouldn’t have likely considered two generations ago. Beyond that, I am thoroughly convinced that I am not okay, and you are not okay if you continue to treat these communities contemptuously without befriending them or listening to their perspectives. Scripture is clear that sexual sin—all sexual sin, most of which occurs in heterosexual contexts—is abhorrent to God, and will harm us spiritually (1 Corinthians 6:18). Even so, nowhere does the Bible teach that these activities are to be elevated above the depravity of hatred.
Piously pretending your contempt is not hatred, and that those sinful thoughts channeling through your brain are not sinful is delusional. If we don’t challenge our own toxic shortcomings, we become like so many Pharisees, calcifying into something worse than that of which we accuse others. Perhaps recognizing our own common sinfulness can become ground zero in our efforts to reach out to fellow travelers—to other surrogates who have also failed to embody God’s glory.
Photo by Nick Fewings on Unsplash
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