Affirmation First, Arguments Maybe

A Perhaps Embarrassing Journey

Today I’m going to give a somewhat brief account of the journey that’s led me to fully affirm the place of LGTBQ people and couples in all aspects of the church’s life (and, of course, society as a whole).

I’ve been hesitant to write this post for a couple of reasons, but a few people have asked me to do something like this, and just in case it’s helpful to folks, I’m going to go ahead and write it, despite my hesitation.

That hesitation comes from a couple of sources, one of them probably more important than the other. The less important one is that I’m frankly a little embarrassed that it took me as long as it did to reach this position and then how long it’s taken me to be more vocally outspoken about it. But human beings are creatures who reach our perfection through iterative (and not always linear!) growth, and it’s better to own that we’ve been wrong and need to change our minds than to pretend to a ready-made perfection. St. John Henry Newman has said that “to live is to change, and to be perfect is to have changed often.”

The more important one is that I don’t really have any new, groundbreaking insights. Rowan Williams basically charted the theological path I’m following in the 1980s. The story I tell is rather pedestrian. In some ways, I feel like this essay should just be a link to “The Body’s Grace,” or to Gene Rogers’s Sexuality and the Christian Body. Because I’m not improving on them. But perhaps just talking about my own process of discernment is helpful in itself, even if I don’t really have an argument to present.

But in the end, I think that’s part of the point. The starting point for this conversation needs to be the full affirmation of LGBTQ folks. Their beauty, goodness, and dignity is not up for discussion. Arguments come in only at a secondary stage, to demonstrate how this fundamental posture of affirmation fits in with other theological commitments.

Early Changes of Mind

I was probably seven or eight when I learned that being “gay” was a thing. My parents were watching something on TV. It involved two men fighting. At a pause in the struggle, one said to the other something like, “Be honest, aren’t you at least a little gay?,” which sent his opponent into a rage, leading—if memory serves—to a flying kick that carried him over a roof top. I asked, “What’s gay?,” and was told, “It’s when a man would rather marry another man than a woman.” Seemed like a pretty rad idea to me at the time.

I wouldn’t be so bold as to say that I was an ally in my youth. The 1990s were a time when casual homophobia was frequently played for cheap laughs in film and television in ways that are shocking to revisit, and I swam those cultural waters. But I also would have been quick to insist that—apparent comedy gold aside—there was nothing in the world wrong with being gay.

In my later teen years, I had an evangelical conversion experience, which brought with it a new earnestness about the Bible. And, as it turns out, “the Bible says” a few things about sex between people of the same gender, and basically none of those things it says are good (I’ll explain the scare quotes later). So I decided that in order to be serious about Christianity, I had to take the “biblical” position and denounce same sex relationships.

Chinks in the Armor

While I felt that in order to be a faithful Christian, I had to adopt homophobia (and even if the positions weren’t motivated by bigotry, they were homophobic), it was not a neat transition. A significant part of that was that I still knew, loved, and respected plenty of gay folks. And not just gay people, but also gay Christians, from some of whom I learned a lot about the faith and was made a better Christian for having known them. This is going to be more of a factor as we go on, but it took a while for these seeds to germinate, alas.

And along the way, I was exposed to compelling theological arguments for LGBTQ affirmation. Above I mentioned Rowan Williams’s “The Body’s Grace,” in which he notes that for a church that has opted to allow for contraception, there’s really no consistent basis for forbidding same-sex relationships. That essay, by the way, contains one of my favorite theological statements of all time:

The whole story of creation, incarnation and our incorporation into the fellowship of Christ's body tells us that God desires us, as if we were God, as if we were that unconditional response to God's giving that God's self makes in the life of the trinity. We are created so that we may be caught up in this; so that we may grow into the wholehearted love of God by learning that God loves us as God loves God.

Then there were arguments based on the movement of Gentile inclusion in the covenant, particularly through close readings of Acts 10, in which Peter is instructed to “kill and eat,” a bevy of unclean animals. At first, he’s sure he cannot do any such thing, for the biblical law prohibits this, but he is told not to call unclean what God has made clean, before having the same lesson play out with people at the house of Cornelius. If God is blessing and sanctifying LGBTQ Christians, who are we to insist that the Bible precludes this?

Expanding upon this is Gene Rogers’s observation that Romans 11 uses the same language “contrary to nature” to describe God’s inclusion of the Gentiles, as it does to characterize same-sex sexuality in chapter 1.

For quite some time, I found that I didn’t quite have an answer for any of these arguments, but I also felt that I was stuck because of the “clear teaching” of Scripture.

The House of Cards’ Collapse

Thus far, we really have all the ingredients that led to me affirming LGBTQ folks: the witness of LGBTQ Christians and theological accounts for how this witness could be reconciled with traditional theological categories. But I still held out on doing so for several years more.

But then as a new wave of unarmed Black Americans being murdered by the police (or private citizens) began to crest, I realized just how exactly the arguments against affirming the dignity of Black life against the claims of white property mirrored the arguments that were marshaled against affirming LGBTQ Christians in the church. As I sought to educate myself about white supremacy, I came to recognize just how thoroughly it paralleled other structures of oppression (especially gender and sexuality based oppression). The same sorts of arguments that were used against LGBTQ expression were also used against the abolition of slavery.

This brought me to the realization: “the Bible says” a lot of things. And some of the things it “says” are pretty bad. The same book endorses slavery, including the impregnation of one’s slaves before abandoning them and the resulting child into the wilderness to die. The same book “talks” about women as property, etc. If I utterly reject slavery and its accompanying evils, then I’m already making decisions about what “in the Bible” I’m going to follow and what I’m going to reject. There’s no escape from that. No one takes the Bible literally without modifications with full consistency. So it’s not a matter of “following the Bible” or not. It’s a matter of having clear principles that determine how one engages with the Bible.

Because, in the end, the Bible doesn’t say anything. It’s an inanimate object. Its words are mere marks on a page. It takes acts of human meaning (and divine meaning!) to arrange those marks in such a way as to communicate anything, or to look upon them and draw a message from them. We cannot shirk our moral responsibility by pretending that we are inert before those marks. There’s no getting away from human agency. So, yeah, if I was going to say that same-sex relationships have to be rejected because “the Bible says” so, I was going to have to take responsibility not only for that position but for the way that I didn’t make the same move of affirming slavery on the same basis.

Now, I don’t think this gives us a free for all. We still need to reckon with the language of Scripture and the witness of the theological tradition. These convey divine revelation to us. But that revelation comes to us through human mediation. The biblical authors and most of the theological tradition tend to operate with heteronormative assumptions. But that doesn’t necessarily mean that the heteronormativity is revealed (even as it’s not a foregone conclusion that it’s not revealed). We have to sort through what we’ve received in light of our understanding of the world and do the best we can to be faithful. I talk about these dynamics at greater length in my book Ruptured Bodies: A Theology of the Church Divided.

We actually understand sexuality and gender pretty differently now than the ancient world did. The whole category of sexual orientation is not much more than a hundred years old. So, while the theological tradition speaks about men having sex with each other, or women doing the same, the meaning of such acts are constructed in a radically different manner, arguably so different that it’s talking about something else entirely than what’s happening with contemporary gay couples.

In the Graeco-Roman context, for instance, for a man to penetrate someone was a sign of his dominance over them. Whether such penetration was of a homosexual or heterosexual nature (I generally try to avoid the term “homosexual,” but I don’t have a handy substitute here), it was a far cry from how we understand sex to function to day (or at least I hope it was). The idea of a loving mutuality, to say nothing of a persistent orientation of one’s sexual desire, just wasn’t on the table in antiquity.

Now, again, none of this determines anything. One could take all of the things I’ve outlined (the ambiguity of Scripture, the fact of historical change, etc.) and still conclude against LGBTQ expression. I think they’d be wrong. But it’s a logical possibility based on the premises. And in the end, it’s none of those things that wound up persuading me. They’ve helped me integrate my commitment to LGBTQ flourishing with my other theological commitments, they’ve shown me how to do this in a way that’s compatible with the historic Christian faith, but they’ve not convinced me to do so.

Instead, what has convinced me is what I’ve mentioned several times upstream: the witness of LGBTQ Christians. As I look at their faithful marriages, as I see them express their love for Jesus, as I hear their recognition that they are loved by Jesus, not in spite of, but precisely in their queerness, I find myself compelled to affirm what I see. (Of course, all LGBTQ folks should be affirmed, not just the Christian ones, but the fact of faithful LGBTQ Christians is its own proof that there is no contradiction or incompatibility between being both queer and Christian.)

The Christian churches have been notoriously painful spaces for their LGBTQ members. And to see the resilience of queer faith in the face of that kind of abuse is truly inspiring. I don’t know that I’d have it in me to keep showing up when I’ve been told over and over again that there’s no place for me, when I’ve seen my correligionists working to build a world that kills people like me (I’m not exaggerating here. The rates of suicidality among LGBTQ youth in circumstances where they’re not accepted is actually really important data here. More important than a handful of Bible verses.) I can’t attribute this resilience to anything but the grace of God. And what God has sanctified, I dare not call unclean.

Following Shawn Copeland, if Jesus Christ has embraced LGBTQ people as his own, making them his very own flesh, then I cannot hold fast to him unless I also hold fast to them. As she pointedly puts it, “If Jesus of Nazareth, the Christ of God, cannot be an option for gay and lesbian and transgender persons, then he cannot be an option [at all].”

So, there you have it. The witness of queer Christians has led me to affirm my LGBTQ siblings, their lives, and their loves, in all areas of the church’s life. And my own reckoning with the way the Bible has been used to prop up various structures of oppression has given me strategies for reading Scripture that allow me to make this move.

As I promised, I’ve not added anything as far as arguments go. But that’s because we don’t really need arguments. No one’s human dignity is up for argumentation or debate. Instead, we move from that fundamental recognition—this is a beloved child of God—to figuring out how that fits in with the rest of the theological tradition (and not the other way around).