Evangelical Ethics: Issues Facing the Church Today by John Jefferson Davis (Presbyterian and Reformed Publishing, 1985, 299 pp.)
by Dr. Ralph Blair
Flannery O’Connor once said: “Ignorance is excusable when it is borne like a cross, but when it is wielded like an axe and with moral indignation, then it becomes something else indeed.”
In this book, a theology professor at Gordon-Conwell Seminary attempts to write on birth control, divorce, remarriage, abortion, capital punishment, euthanasia, war and homosexuality. Though he takes positions with which evangelicals differ radically, only those who disagree with him on homosexuality are said to be “comprom[ing] the fundamental biblical teaching”. This is so even though tolerated alternative views on other issues are supported by more and clearer texts than is his position on homosexuality. This review will focus on Davis’ 23-page chapter on homosexuality. Since the chapter’s faults arise from Davis’ misplaced confidence in secondary sources, we’ll pay particular attention to these sources.
One of his “experts”, Paul Cameron, was thrown out of the American Psychological Association for ethical violations, misrepresenting others’ research and calling gay people “fecal eaters” and “urine drinkers” who are “better suited” as murderers. Strangely, Cameron fears that homosexuals’ “hot, dripping sex [is] better sex, on the average, than heterosexual sex”, which, he says, is “poorer sex permanently”. Cameron thinks heterosexuality “needs all the help it can get [because] the developmental process is decidedly tilted toward the adoption of homosexuality” and he laments that males are “not very well suited” to females. No wonder he’s no longer at Fuller Seminary, as Davis mistakenly has him. Depending on Cameron for information on incidence of homosexuality, Davis doubts another secondary source (psychiatrist Judd Marmor) even though Marmor is reliable. Davis misunderstands his quotation from sexologist John Money, failing to see that instead of supporting his argument, Money counters it. He tries to use Money (“leading authority on the physiological aspects”) against biological etiology but Money says au contraire that a “confluence of heredity and environment” and biological “predisposition” are at work in etiology and that, at bottom, all is chemistry anyway. Davis cites psychologist Evelyn Hooker’s agreement with Money as though she’s in agreement with Davis himself and then he jumps to the contrary that it is all a matter of social “interac[tion]” for which homosexuals are thus “morally responsible”. Another of Davis’ “experts” is Greg Bahnsen, antigay proponent of theonomy, a worldview that Christianity Today calls “unnecessarily unbending … unloving [and] idiosyncratic”. No wonder Bahnsen was disqualified from Reformed Seminary. Another “expert” (Bateau) dismisses all non-Christian behavioral science and looks to the “Bible counseling” of Jay Adams for “changed homosexuals”. Another “expert”, Enrique Rureda, is a Right-wing Catholic priest who lumps as “leftists”, all homosexuals, The Salvation Army, Bread for the World and the National Association of Evangelicals. Repeatedly, Davis uses outdated anecdotal sources of the 1920s, 1940s and 1950s as if these represented the latest clinical and psychosocial research. Moral Majority Report is one of Davis’ more current sources.
Davis cites another antigay Right-wing secondary source to “prove [that] the claim that homosexuality is an irreversible condition is patently untrue”. But had he done his homework in the primary sources cited he would have discovered that, far from “show[ing] that homosexuality can be reversed”, the most prominent psychiatrist he cites for authority on reversability, Lawrence Hatterer, admits that even after ruling out most candidates for “change” as unpromising, one must recognize: “Any expectation that his past homosexual consciousness shall be totally removed from all levels of consciousness is completely unreasonable. Hence”, according to Hatterer, “even after he has gained and sustained control over his homosexuality, relapses can evoke acute anxiety, depression, withdrawal, or even a sudden impulsive reentry into a period of protracted homosexual practice”. (Over the years, Hatter has referred patients to this reviewer.) But Davis quotes from The Pilot: “Changing sexual preference is not particularly difficult”, even for a Kinsey 6. Curiously, Davis does not push the claims of the “ex-gay” movement.
He misrepresents what he calls “the most comprehensive research on homosexual behavior in various cultures” (the decades-old work by Ford and Beach). But he gets their statistics wrong and then fails to report that they found that homosexuality is seen as “normal and socially acceptable in two-thirds of societies” – the opposite of what Davis says they say. They even say that “a biological tendency for inversion of sexual behavior is inherent in most if not all mammals including the human species”. Of course, Davis neglects to mention this.
Davis repeats the misinformed notion that the American Psychiatric Association dropped homosexuality from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders under pressure from gay militants. In reality, the exclusion was a part of an entire revision of the DSM classification system based on newer scientific research. Antigay psychiatrists then tried to overrule science with votes.
In explaining biblical passages, Davis oversteps where even his common “root fallacy” in semantics would normally hesitate, confuses the Pauline use of “flesh” with psychosexual “orientation”, argues against all sex without procreative possibility, and damns all homosexuality as nothing but lust. With the arrogance3 of segregationists of the 1950s, Davis insists that the analogy of gay and black civil rights “is a specious one”, thereby setting his own view against that of Coretta Scott King, Andrew Young, Bayard Rusten, Jesse Jackson, et. al.
It’s more than a disgrace when a book called Evangelical Ethics is so full of lies, half-truths, sloppy errors, self-contradiction, and self-serving insensitivity to oppressed men and women. Whatever happened to the evangel? Whatever happened to the Golden Rule?