“Liberty’s Loss” by Tim Dalrymple, World, July 30, 2011.
“Born Homosexual? A Parent’s Guide” by Chuck Colson, Breakpoint.org, June 1, 2011.
“Evangelicals and the Gay Moral Revolution” by Albert Mohler, Jr., The Wall Street Journal, July 1, 2011.
The scary teaser in the Religious Right’s World magazine is: “Same-sex marriage in New York threatens the rights of those who oppose it.” Actually, any legal protection from discrimination more than “threatens” discriminators – it outlaws their “right” to discriminate! Though protections for churches and clergy are written into this law, World worries that Christians may not be “comfortable” offering services to same-sex couples. Well, are they comfortable offering services to non-Christians, the divorced and remarried, mixed-race couples? Are they comfortable when loving their “enemies” as they love themselves? Taking offence, Dalrymple warns that, “gay couples will take offense if they are not offered the same services traditional couples receive.” Well, if the haves take offense when the have-nots get to have, why wouldn’t the have-nots take offense over the haves’ continuing selfishness? He warns that, “the same well-funded activists who pushed the same-sex marriage bill into law will continue to make their case in the courts and in the statehouses.” No doubt. As will the well-funded Right.
Colson continues to push discredited notions long pushed by George Rekers who had to resign from organized “reparative” therapy after being caught returning from Europe with a young guy he’d hired from a gay rent-boy service. Colson pushes Joseph Nicolosi’s new book that credits Rekers’ idea that “sissy” behavior is “the single most common” precursor to homosexuality. Colson’s Breakpoint comes just as news breaks that a 5-year-old “pre-homosexual” boy’s case, long touted as Rekers’ most “successful” gay-prevention case, has ended in suicide for the 38-year-old gay man who was that little boy. The family traces his depression and death to “reparative” coercion and its years of prescribed corporal punishment and shaming for his “sissy” mannerisms.
Colson is not trained to evaluate this therapy, so he endorses it. He quotes Nicolosi: “We are all designed to be heterosexual. Confusion about gender is primarily a psychological condition, and to some extent, it can be modified.” Colson: “This is exactly the opposite message we hear from gay activists”. So, he urges, “stay tuned” for more, so your children, too, can be, “to some extent … modified”.
Mohler, president of Southern Baptist Seminary, calls homosexuality “a challenge that is shaking [the] foundations” of the church – as if the church’s foundations are about what a growing number of evangelical scholars agrees was unknown in Bible days. Bernard Ramm, a wiser Baptist scholar, advised that, “incidental references [such as Mohler’s] cannot be the foundation of doctrine.”
Mohler’s alarm is reminiscent of his denomination’s bygone defense of foundations in slavery, segregation and miscegenation traditions, and he makes as strained a “Bible” case as did his forefathers. He swears: “Since we believe that the Bible is God’s revealed word, we cannot accommodate ourselves to this new morality. We cannot pretend as if we do not know [what] the Bible clearly teaches”. But what “the Bible clearly teaches” is not necessarily the same as what some folks say it clearly teaches. When it comes to the Golden Rule, we’re all masters at rationalizing, and nothing will quite do like a proof-text or two from the Bible. Overlooking embarrassing “Bible-based” traditions of earlier eras, Mohler reminds us that, on homosexuality: “most Americans once shared [his] moral assumptions”. And, as did the old guard, he sends out a signal of distress: “a new world is coming fast.”
Then, a bit less stridently, he says: “Our greatest fear is not that homosexuality will be normalized and accepted, but that homosexuals will not come to know of their own need for Christ and the forgiveness of their sins.” But is he deaf to the din of his “biblical” belittling that so out-shouts whatever else he wants gay folk to hear? In fact, while most of his antigay cohorts do not blame homosexuals for same-sex orientation, Mohler, in a July 19 blog, insists: “The New Testament reveals that a homosexual sexual orientation, whatever its shape or causation, is essentially wrong, contrary to the Creator’s purpose, and deeply sinful.” The orientation is “deeply sinful”? This is eisegesis! The Bible no more addresses sexual orientation than it does a preacher’s blog on the worldwide web.
Still, Mohler admits: “It is now abundantly clear that evangelicals have failed in so many ways to meet this challenge. We have often spoken about homosexuality in ways that are crude and simplistic.” Yes. “We have failed to take account of how tenaciously sexuality comes to define us as human beings.” Yes. “We have failed to see the challenge of homosexuality as a Gospel issue.” Yes. “We are the ones, after all, who are supposed to know that the Gospel of Jesus Christ is the only remedy for sin, starting with our own.” Yes. But he’s still not getting it. for he allows himself and other heterosexuals to “take account of how tenaciously” their own heterosexual needs “define us as human beings” while he refuses “unto others” a just-as tenaciously experienced need for sexual intimacy. He admits to “homophobia” but insists it’s not the homophobia of which they’re accused. He grants: “We have been afraid to face this issue where it is most difficult – face to face.” Yes, for it’s face-to-face that we meet with real people instead of caricatures. And it’s in just such face-to-face encounter that homophobic Christians are loosing their argument! For, as more family members come out as gay, it’s not so easy to maintain old stakes, stereotypes and simplistic solutions and simply move on. Even Mohler sees “we are talking about our own brothers and sisters, our own friends and neighbors, or maybe the young person in the next pew.”
In the end, Mohler intends to make one point but makes quite a different point: “It is not the world around us that is being tested, so much as the believing church. We are about to find out just how much we believe the Gospel we so eagerly preach.” Which gospel? Is it the gay-bashing “gospel” or the Good News that, God was in Christ, reconciling the world to Himself, not counting people’s sins against them? (II Cor 5:19)