“Reaching Homosexuals with the Gospel” by William S. Barker and “I’ll Never Tell Anyone I Have a Problem with Homosexuality” by Stephen M. Crotts, Presbyterian Journal, February 25, 1987. “Listening to the Homosexual” by Sheldon Vanauken, Catholicism in Crisis, April 1986. “How to know if You Have Fallen in Love” by David and Carole Hocking, Focus on the Family, February 1987.
by Dr. Ralph Blair
These magazine articles form a queer quartet for Christian analysis of homosexuality. The Hockings’ subject in this book excerpt in James Dobson’s publication is not homosexuality per se. But their point – that “God’s intention for marriage is that it be characterized by romance” – is the missing perspective in the act-focused approach of Barker, Crotts and other fundamentalists who insist that a homosexual simply avoid certain nerve-endings of another homosexual and/or go through a heterosexual wedding and thereafter keep quiet.
The Hockings observe that “if all a couple has going for them is the fact of a past ceremony, a couple of kids and a few years under their belt, they are living together in a relationship that is less than what God intended. Romantic love is needed in every marriage. The Bible’s Song of Solomon makes that fact abundantly clear”. However one might question the exporting of modern romance back into ancient texts or the ability to concoct romance without an imprinted predisposition, the Hockings’ point is crucial. After all, what separates homosexuals from heterosexuals is a given psychosexual ability to fall in love with a member of one gender instead of the other. When the focus is on genital friction and/or ritual, things are out of focus. But it seems impossible for fundamentalists to let go of their fixation on genital acts, some of the least involved and involving aspects of sexuality.
Even when Vanauken seems to see that there is something other than genital sex in gay marriage, he trips over his obsession with genitalia: “I have sometimes wondered, thinking of faithful Joseph and Mary, ever-Virgin, whether two Christian homosexuals, in love but offering up to God the sexual [i.e., genital] expression of that love, might not live together in perfect chastity with a great love free from sin”. What might Vanauken say about a peck on the cheek or hand-holding in the golden years? It would surely be sexual – and thus, so sinful! Parenthetically, many long-term relationships of either sexual orientation are bereft of a genital component since it becomes harder and harder to integrate the genital and the familial in the sex-negativity fostered by parents, priests, preachers and pornographers. Sadly, Vanauken takes no more serious note of “homos” because he underestimates the homosexual population at a mere “5 percent or more” and fails to expect any outcome but a “sterile dead-end of homo-sex”. Vanauken’s rabid Romanism exchanges the vision of Vatican II for visions of Veronica Lueken of Bayside.
Turning to the Presbyterian Journal we find no awareness of homosexuality as other than a vile genital habit. Editor Barker presents an interview with John Freeman, leader of a Philadelphia “ex-gay” program affiliated with Homosexuals Anonymous, the group founded by Colin Cook, the Seventh-day Adventist “ex-gay” leader who has now admitted under fire to years of sex with the young men who have been coming to him to “change”. Barker and Freeman contradict each other: Barker boasts about “ex-gays” getting married (Barker has a desktop photo of Freeman and wife) while “dating and marriage is not the appropriate goal”, according to Freeman. “That can just create problems for the wife”. It certainly did for Cook. [The Cooks later divorced.]
Without psychological credentials, Freeman claims that homosexuality is “not a sexual, behavioral problem” but a “spiritual” problem, (ala Jay Adams?. Homosexuals won’t recognize themselves as depicted by Barker and Freeman but their relatives and pastors will be misled into thinking that these caricatures are lifelike portraits of the gay members of their families and churches. Contrary to Barker’s title, no homosexual will be reached with this “gospel”. It’s not good news; it’s only bad advice.
Crotts continues the same twisting of scriptural and sexual facts. He mentions more “acceptable sins” as just as sinful as homosexuality – e.g., “sports on Sunday” and “over-consumeristic lifestyle”. But where is the fundamentalist outcry over these that matches the outcry over homosexuality? He describes several cases of “homosexuality” (e.g., a sissy, a tomboy, a rape victim, a “misinformed”, a ridiculed, etc.) – all of whom seem incorrectly designated as cases of homosexuality. He claims repeatedly that “a person becomes a homosexual by choice”, as the person tries to adapt to society’s response to “appearance, temperaments and skills” that are unacceptable. But Crotts overlooks society’s more hostile response to the supposed adaptation “chosen” by the homosexual. He refers to “genetic predispositioning”, weirdly calling it something “achieved” following the “choice” to be homosexual. But doesn’t predisposition mean an inclination to something in advance? Though he denies “physical and psychological predispositioning” (these are problematic to the fundamentalists’ agenda), he strangely – and stereotypically – refers to Esau (“very hairy, an outdoorsman”) and Jacob (“a mama’s boy who loved to cook”) and thinks genetics can “come into play as one makes sexual choices”. Crotts deplores that “the best family and church can do is to hiss ‘It’s dirty! Just don’t do it!’”, but then his own advice is: “Say ‘No’ quickly … refuse to go” and “envision the consequences … Disease. Sin. Death. Detection. Such a vista of pain will give you incentive”. He admits that the “change” is a “constant struggle … [with] lots of tears and frustrations”. “Solutions” such as these assure that gay readers will continue to live out Crotts’ title: “I’ll Never Tell”!