Evangelicals Concerned Inc.
“Let’s Talk – Seriously”, Christianity Today, February 2009. Christianity and Homosexuality: Some Seventh-day Adventist Perspectives edited by David Ferguson, Fritz Guy and David Larson (Adventist Forum, 2008, 370 pp.)
by Dr. Ralph Blair
Christianity Today says Newsweek’s “Religious Case for Gay Marriage” is a “not-so-subtle attempt to marginalize those who hold the traditional view”. But if Newsweek marginalizes, so does CT, marginalizing evangelicals who support gay marriage. CT faults Newsweek’s Jon Meacham for phrasing that “suggests that he’s not interested in honest dialogue”. Is CT interested in any dialogue with pro-gay evangelicals?
CT caricatures Meacham’s approach as name-calling and “Gnosticism”. But if he’s guilty, how much more are these CT editors! CT poses “special knowledge” that’s especially ignorant or worse, pushing discredited “ex-gay” claims – even a Colin Cook essay after he was fired for repeated sexual experiences with young men who’d sought him out for the “ex-gay” experience.
Even among those who join CT in rejecting gay marriage, there’s recognition that sexual orientation is not a matter of choice. Yet Meacham’s noting it’s not a choice gets ridiculed: “As if all scientists of sexuality agree that sexual orientation is as given as skin color. As if we need to quit denying this supposed fact and just recognize reality”. Supposed fact? Peer-reviewed science, clinical data and even all the failed “ex-gay” claims indicate that sexual orientation is inherent and immutable. Isn’t the heterosexual experience of CT’s editors instructive enough? Did they choose their orientation? Can they change it?
Meacham’s noting that, “History and demographics are on the side of those who favor inclusion over exclusion” (something as old as God’s promise to Abraham) is met by CT’s objection in obfuscation – a weird allusion to Nazi claims that their time (for including others?) had come. Rather more to the point, in race issues, history shows a move from “biblically” rationalized slavery and segregation to integration, mixed-race congregations and interracial marriage. Trends have been toward the inclusion of women clergy, fraternal relations between evangelicals and Catholics, fellowship with Seventh-day Adventists, Pentecostals and charismatic brethren, acceptance of divorced or remarried people in church leadership, and revision of “biblical” morality on loans at interest, military service, drinking wine, masturbation, birth control, etc.
But CT smirks: “When a writer pulls out the ‘history and demographics’ rhetoric, you know he is at the end of his rope. He’s simply trying to intimidate … ‘It’s going to happen whether you like it or not’.” Well, in CT’s 25th anniversary issue (July 17, 1981), church historian Martin Marty observed that, “the journal’s moral outlook often looked bourgeois as much as biblical [and] seldom provided venturesome leadership to the evangelicals in civil rights and other rights struggles.” He said: “Only after a movement made its way and began to become less controversial did the editors grow less wary.” Alluding to CT’s right-leaning “financial sponsors”, Marty noted that, “the editors played it safe with ‘the system’ ”. Will CT be in the reluctant rear end once again?
A 2006 Pew survey finds that 30 percent of white evangelicals and 35 percent of black Protestants favor gay civil unions. Another Pew survey finds that 14 percent of white evangelicals and 15 percent of black evangelicals support gay marriage. A 2008 Greenberg Quinlan Rosner poll finds that 46 percent of white evangelicals over 30, and 58 percent of white evangelicals under 30, support gay marriage or civil unions.
And it’s not just the younger generation that’s been coming around on this issue. EC’s founding in 1975 was supported by the founding president of Covenant Seminary as well as by a president of the Evangelical Theological Society who chaired OT translation for the NIV Bible. In 1976, bestselling author Eugenia Price wrote me: “I am more enthusiastic than these few hastily written (and poorly typed!) lines will convey. Right on, man! Jesus Christ backs you up every step of the way.” In 1980, Rosalind Rinker, an EC board member, keynoted our first EC western conference. In 2006, CT editors voted her book, Prayer: Conversing with God, as No. 1 among the “50 landmark books that have changed the way American evangelical Christians think, talk, worship and live”. EC keynoters have included scholars Lewis B. Smedes and Nicholas Wolterstorff, writers Kay Lindskoog and Charlie Shedd, singers Cynthia Clawson and Ken Medema, faculty (including chairmen) at colleges such as Anderson, Calvin and Trinity (Deerfield) and InterVarsity, Word, NavPress and Zondervan authors. CT has never reported any of this.
CT invites Meacham “to sit down with us, or someone from our world, to have a biblically minded, intellectually rich conversation.” How about CT’s sitting down and seriously listening to evangelical Christians who happen to be gay and lesbian?
A good example of such dialogue is a new book by Seventh-day Adventists from across a spectrum of views. They look into matters autobiographical, biomedical, behavioral, sociological and scriptural/theological. Says one writer: “The church has no biblical license to sanction the practice of homosexuality”. But, he adds: “Christ’s approach demands that [the church] be a haven of support”. Another says: “Scripture does not condemn all same-sex love.” Another calls for “affirm[ing of] each other as fellow believers and together pursue[ing] a clearer understanding of this difficult issue.” Another writes of her lesbian partnership and their daughter, Grace, named after they finished reading Philip Yancey’s What’s So Amazing about Grace? “We felt that this little gift of a baby perfectly symbolized the undeserved and unexpected ways that God moved in our lives.” Other chapters are by the mother of a gay son, a gay-affirming psychiatrist, and a sociologist writing about the SDA gay/lesbian network and about the Colin Cook “ex-gay” hoax that CT endorsed.
In 1960, CT published “cult watcher” Walter Martin’s conclusion that SDA folk were brothers and sisters in Christ, not cultists. Shouldn’t CT now get past prejudice and institutional constraints to get to know evangelical siblings who happen to be gay or lesbian? “Let’s talk – seriously”.