GLBT Issues: Two Sides, Two Views

Can't we just agree to disagree?

This is the question I implicitly raised in reacting to Episcopalian Bishop Spong's recent Manifesto about giving up trying to debate or talk to people who don't believe GLBT folk deserve equal status in church and civic life. I myself have written about the GLBT question in relation to fractures afflicting my own United Methodist denomination. Lutherans, Episcopalians, Presbyterians, Methodists--nearly all the "mainline" denominations are facing possible schisms over this issue.

As I've mentioned before, I see the GLBT issue largely as a sock puppet for a deeper conflict about Biblical inerrancy and authority. Scripture seems fairly clear, in a "plain sense" sort of reading, about its prohibitions regarding same-sex erotic behavior. Spong and others have been quite active in deconstructing such plain sense readings of verses like Leviticus 18:22 ("Do not lie with a man as one lies with a woman; that is detestable"), but for a great many people of the old "Bible believing" tradition of plain-and-simple-ism, such critical efforts look like chicanery by effete intellectual snobs desperate to weasel their way out of hard truths. Some weaseling and deconstruction they've had to accept--re-interpreting or un-interpreting verses supporting slavery and segregation or passages prohibiting women's ordination--but on the GBLT issue they (the conservatives) have had enough. The slippery slope of re-interpretation stops for them at the reclassification of homosexuality as a non-sin.

The other side--Spong's side, and mine--offers an equally passionate, frustrated reply. Namely, that the church's attitude toward GLBT people is morally wrong and theologically bankrupt. On the latter point, my side argues that the "plain sense" of scripture is at least as full of shenanigans and weaselly interpretive maneuvers as any other hermeneutic--only it's a lot less honest about it. No one reads the Bible totally in its "plain sense." There's always an interpretive consensus--a meta-interpretive framework--that tacitly defines the "sense" that is supposedly "plain."

Take the newish conservative argument that asserts that the Bible promotes--with perfect consistency--a single ideal plan for human living: one man, one woman, for life, in holy matrimony. That's simply preposterous, given the numerous Biblical heroes who had multiple wives (e.g., David, Solomon, Jacob). or no wives at all (e.g., John the Baptist, Jesus, Elijah). Paul is fairly explicit in defining marriage as a last resort for those unable to overcome their lustful natures (I Corinthians 7:9). The only way to read the Bible and come to the conclusion that God specifically and specially ordains non-polygamous, heterosexual marriage as the Ideal and Only Path for Humans is to read with an interpretive lens that blocks out all of the numerous counter-examples and magnifies the verses that seem best to support the hetero-marriage view.

One only has to glance at the history of debates about slavery, women's suffrage, and segregation in this country to see loads of verses quoted with plain-sense fervor in the service of points of view we would now consider repugnant (to be fair, the "good" sides of these debates had their share of Bible-quoters as well). Christianity relies on the Bible, but the Word we worship isn't paper and ink but the living, dynamic Christ whose Spirit moves among us this day.

But--beyond decrying the Biblical chicanery of "plain sense" hermeneutics--my side sees the anti-GLBT side as unloving and un-Christlike. Nothing about same-sex eroticism violates the imperative to love God and to love one's neighbor. The multiple and ongoing campaigns by various conservative religious forces to paint GLBT people as inherently--and solely because of their sexuality--sick, disordered, immoral, or damaged all lose viability when confronted by the example and witness of actual GLBT people. Worse, the vitriol and, frankly, dishonesty that characterizes many of these campaigns bespeak a raw sort of prejudice, a cultural or personal distaste for same-sex behavior and identities that lacks any foundation in logic or the Spirit.

What won the day in struggles about women's rights or racial equality wasn't a superior collection of powerhouse verses but a holy conviction that it is wrong to use non-maleness or non-whiteness as a reason to restrict the full exercise of membership in civic or church life. It is wrong, argue mainline churches, to view women as unfit for ordained ministry even though the scripture literally says otherwise. It is wrong to have slaves, to execute a woman who defends herself from rape though violence, to segregate races, to forbid interracial marriage--to do a host of things the Bible either allows or commands when read in its "plain sense." We believe it's wrong despite the plain sense scriptures to the contrary because the Spirit overcomes the letter.

Why? Because love wins. That's the overriding pattern of Jesus's ministry on earth. If he encounters a person that religious law (the "plain sense" of scripture) would forbid him to touch or speak to, he breaks the law to reach the person. "Lord," begs the leper in Matthew 11, "if you're willing, you can make me clean." Christ reaches out and touches the leper--an explicit violation of Biblical law: "Of course I'm willing. Be clean." Christ's power cured the leprosy, but I think it was the touch that healed.

And again in Acts: "But God, these animals you tell me to eat [i.e., the Gentiles you tell me to preach to] are unclean according to your Law," protests Peter in Acts 10. "Do not call unclean what I have called clean," God responds, "I am changing the rules."

Thus it is, my side argues, with the GLBT issue. It does no good for Christ-followers to hide behind rules when those rules seem to justify unfair treatment or unloving attitudes. Love demands we weigh the good of the person in balance with orthodoxy to a culturally bound rule. The church's attitude toward GLBT people hurts those people and hurts the witness of God (see Kinnaman and Lyon's book Unchristian, where their research identifies the primary adjective that young non-believers link to Christianity as anti-homosexual). It may be in certain interpretations technically Biblical, but it's unChristian.

If those are the two sides (and of course, I've simplified a great deal), is co-existence possible? Can those two sides agree to disagree?

More tomorrow,

JF