“The Loving Opposition: Speaking the truth in a climate of hate” by Stanton L. Jones, Christianity Today, July 19, 1993.
by Dr. Ralph Blair
The subtitled “hate” is emblazoned over a cover photo of an enraged demonstrator in a gay civil rights march.
Christianity Today called the march a “mob spectacle” and said “communism …is implicit in [its] ideology”. But that was Christianity Today thirty years ago, attacking Martin Luther King’s March on Washington! Today’s Christianity Today wouldn’t say such things. Today, Christianity Today attacks homosexuals and gay civil rights. Yet in the issue with letters on Jones’ essay, another essay, “The Myth of Racial Progress”, features African-American evangelicals voicing anger over the sin of continuing racism in American cultural evangelicalism. One recalls his dorm at a mostly white Chriwstian college erupting in cheers at news of King’s assassination. Another says a black executive at a mostly white evangelical organization was told recently that her teenage son can’t date a white colleague’s daughter. Says John Perkins: “Something is wrong at the root of American evangelicalism”. Something of what’s wrong is a baptizing of racial and sexual stereotypes from the dominant society. As J. Deotis Roberts ofr Eastern Baptist Seminary says: “Black Christians love the Bible, but it is their interpretation that differs from white evangelicals. African-Americans know the Bible as a means of oppression as well as …liberation”. So do gay men and lesbians. Students at a mostly heterosexual Christian college erupted in cheers this year when a rightwing speaker said that a gay rights activist had died of AIDS. Do heterosexual evangelicals allow sons and daughters to openly date others of their own gender or do they force them underground?
Edith Jones of World Vision says that for whites to “write about us rather than letting us tell who we are … is usurping and castrating”, adding, “The greatest thing whites can do is ask, ‘What can I do?’” That’s not what white Joneses some generations back asked their human “property” they branded “Jones” under cover of Bible verses. And it’s not what CT asks lesbians and gay men today. Instead, CT asks a fellow member of the oppressing heterosexual majority, the chair of psychology at a conservative evangelical college, and this Jones presents what CT calls “our response to the homosexual crisis”. At this point of departure, CT’s effort departs into myth, misrepresentation and misunderstanding.
Would it be fair to say that when one thinks of blacks one thinks only of drug-addicted muggers impregnating teenagers promiscuously and then dying of AIDS? Yet Jones begins by saying that when he thinks of homosexuals he things of a seducer of teenage boys who died of AIDS, a promiscuous gay man who married a woman and is “almost completely healed”, an artificially-inseminated New Age lesbian, a gay man who left his wife and says he wants a monogamous relationship with another man but “has yet to achieve” that and “no longer attends church”, and another who goes to church where “opportunities for honesty are few and far between” and struggles alone to be celibate for the rest of his life.
When I think of homosexuals, I can think of monogamous couples as well as people who are promiscuous. I think of ex-“ex-gay” leaders who testify that they never saw anyone change orientation in that movement. And I think of honored theologians, Bible scholars, missionaries, founders of evangelical institutions, presidents, teachers, clergy, bestselling authors, musicians and other evangelicals who are regularly celebrated – though closeted – in the pages of CT.
Jones addresses the “many Christians [who] are unprepared” for what he calls “the revisionists’ arguments for rejecting” bible prooftexts used against homosexuals, but he himself admits that they “have an element of legitimacy”. Though he’s not a Bible scholar, Jones belittles “revisionists” and asserts that only “by gross misinterpretation or by moving away from a high view of Scripture” can these verses be read differently. He fails to cite evangelical “revisionists” (e.g., members of the Evangelical Theological Society, including a past president of ETS). He fails to note that CT’s views on racial integration, a quick-fix “cure” for homosexuality, and other issues have been revised following revisions in Bible interpretation.
Jones plays theologian by arguing for heterosexuality on the basis of a picture of the Church as Christ’s Bride, by demanding – against The Golden Rule – that all homosexuals be lifelong celibates, and by attacking the New Testament ethic that “love fulfills the law” as a “liberalization” (as, indeed, it was when Jesus and Paul taught it 2,000 years ago!). Even his psychology is flawed. He trivializes the profound experience of psychosexual orientation of same-gender love, but not of heterosexual love. The biblical writers didn’t address it so Jones discounts it, caricaturing it as misplaced identity. He feigns ignorance of the fact that gay and lesbian couples achieve thee same quality of “unity” that he claims only heterosexuals do.
Jones ends with an appeal for “compassion to see ourselves in another”. But the presentation won’t help heterosexuals see themselves in Jones’ homosexuals.