“Buried in the Church” by Robbi Kenney, The Evangelical Beacon, January 1, 1983.
God Has No Sexual Preference by Nancy A. Hardesty (Gal. 3:28 Press, 1983, 4pp.)
by Dr. Ralph Blair
In a review of a very bad Broadway play, drama critic Clive Barnes asked: “Why do the dogs get their day in court? Why does anyone even take the trouble to let them bark?” Good questions. And I might add: Why does a reviewer ask busy subscribers, who may not have heard the bark, to listen to a playback of it? Remembering that they are sleeping dogs that we are to let lie, and not lying dogs that so far from sleeping keep up their incessant yelping and snipping at the heels of innocent gay children, we have no choice but to hear, report and warn. Contrary to their claims, these are no hounds of heaven, and their irritating barks are followed by most vicious bites.
Kenney is a heterosexual woman who got into the “ex-gay” movement when her boyfriend came out as gay. Her article is not noteworthy in itself. Like so many things I’ve had to review, there is nothing intrinsically interesting or insightful here. But because there are many Christians who regularly hear nothing but what sounds similar to Kenney and her cohorts, we must again caution: Beware the dog! After all, evangelical Christians tend to be no less provincial than their dissimilar cousins whose reading is limited to the New York Review of Books and they are no less prepared to spot error than when the liberals and “secular humanists” fail to arch an eyebrow while reading, say, Elizabeth Hardwick on what she called the Saint James Version of the Bible in her presumed dissection of Billy Graham. Never mind that she doesn’t know what she’s talking about – neither do her readers, so she’s “safe”. And who cares, anyway? She’s reciting the good old party line, so: Amen, and let’s go to press! It’s that way, too, in the establishment evangelical press when it comes to homosexuality.
What is here more distressing than usual is that Kenney has now been published in the official organ of the respected Evangelical Free Church of America and that imprimatur may be license to do even more damage than has been done before. The promise of “Helping the Homosexual” is printed invitingly across the magazine’s cover for all of those needy readers – gay ones as well as their families and pastors – to see and raise their hopes. But inside the article, what help is given?
Kenney says that she and her staff at their “ex-gay” program, OUTPOST, “counsel and disciple those who want help gaining freedom from homosexuality”. Freedom from homosexuality! Doubtless that’s what honest Freed Church readers want. But is that what they get? An indication of how little she knows is her statement that, “In some cases the [gay] label actually came before the feelings did. … before any … attraction to the same sex was experienced”. She concludes therefore that gay identity is “a very subtle snare of the devil. It is a lie”. But it is rather the “ex-gay” label, that in all cases comes before there is any lessening of attraction to the same sex and comes before any attraction to the other sex, that’s the real snare and lie. And why blame the devil for that?
Kenney admits that homosexuals “have no control” over their homosexual “feelings” but she trivializes and dismisses such “feelings”, saying that “feelings” don’t constitute sin. Evidently, so long as one is technically celibate, one is “ex-gay”. Yet, under the heading of “Making changes”, she continues to offer vague promises such as: “Jesus can change these things if we let Him.” But what things? What sort of “change”? Kenney does not say. In her other “ex-gay” literature, though, she says that, “Change is not some objective thing that can be pinned down” such as “development of heterosexual interests” or “lack of homosexual desires” or “lack of arousal at homosexual stimuli” or “ceasing of homosexual behaviors”. The “change” that Kenney has to offer is none of this. But her frankness elsewhere does not appear in “Buried in the Church”. Why? Isn’t the Free Church ready for it? Don’t its gay children and their families deserve it? The “help” here offered by the Free Church editors will only bury them and the truth deeper into the closet.
On a refreshingly happier note, we turn to church historian Nancy Hardesty’s “Open Letter on Homosexuality”, as her tract is subtitled. In it I find confirmed again an observation I’ve often made: There is nothing like a good background in church history to keep us from making hermeneutical fools of ourselves and, more importantly, victims of others. If homophobes knew better the variety of “orthodoxy” that has come and gone in church history, they might be in a position to take another, more understanding, look at Scripture and go on to understand better the variety that is natural human sexual orientation. They could find, as Hardesty has, that the Bible doesn’t so easily say all those mean things some people are so sure it says, that it “actually says so little about homosexual practices and nothing about homosexual orientation!” And then there would be no need for the silly but damaging efforts of antigay denominational editors. God Has No Sexual Preference is a fine little introduction to the topic of homosexuality and the Bible. While it will be too brief to satisfy the troubled consciences of some – and they have Boswell and others to study – it fits the bill perfectly for those who need no more assurance than can be given in the short but powerful pastoral reminder that, as Hardesty puts it, “The bottom line – the top line – is that God loves people, all persons. … ‘God is Love’.”