On Mere Orthodoxy’s Delusion

Leading evangelical ethicist David Gushee – who in 2014 came to the position of LGBTQ inclusion, to the jeers and riotous attacks of conservatives everywhere – has written a piece on the quickly-vanishing middle ground on the matter of the full rights of LGBTQ persons in the larger culture. “It turns out that you are either for full and unequivocal social and legal equality for LGBT people, or you are against it, and your answer will at some point be revealed. This is true both for individuals and for institutions. Neutrality is not an option. Neither is polite half-acceptance. Nor is avoiding the subject. Hide as you might, the issue will come and find you.”

I found this piece intriguing, as I have been discovering the same thing myself in the last year. Nothing about Gushee’s observations here are false or incorrect. The issue is emerging as a defining issue of our time, and the middle ground is rapidly vanishing beneath our feet. The issue will come and find you.

I am bisexual. Obviously I find this to be a good thing.

Others disagree with that assessment.

One of those others is the supposedly-moderate, deep-thinking evangelical website Mere Orthodoxy. One of their writers, Jake Meador, penned an absurd, comical post in response to Gushee. I think calling it “absurd” and “comical” is fair; he called Gushee a coward in his piece, and has more respect for the sludge he scrapes off the bottom of his shoes than for progressive Christians. “It’s all par for the course for progressive evangelicals like Gushee, of course,” he sighs, with an implied eye-roll. Yes, we’re all a bunch of dum-dums, barely able to get food the narrow distance between our plates and our mouths, woefully oblivious to nuanced debate, facts, or the noble ancients they revere over at Mere Orthodoxy, the same ancients who were cool with slavery, the oppression of women, murdering Jews, and burning witches and pagans.

But I digress. Meador was meandering.

He takes umbrage at one of Gushee’s comments in particular, a comment that has thrown a number of my conservative evangelical friends into apopleptics online since Gushee’s piece was published. “(Religious conservatives) are organizing legal defense efforts under the guise of religious liberty, and interpreting their plight as religious persecution.”

This, more than anything, Meador dislikes. Presuming that Gushee has no knowledge of the lawsuits against conservatives refusing to provide service to paying LGBTQ customers, Meador reviews the (four) cases thus far. But far from not knowing about these cases, perhaps Gushee has a different perspective on them, one in which they are not actually religious persecution. This would indicate Gushee (and progressives generally) are not idiots, but simply see the situation differently, which would put the issue in the category of the pluralism to which conservatives like Meador pay lip service but don’t actually believe in.

Far from being the facts on the ground, Meador’s persecution narrative is just that – a narrative. As the smarty-pants over at Mere Orthodoxy should know, all events are interpreted. From Meador’s perspective, “if you tell a person ‘I am ordering you to choose between your conscience and your livelihood,’ you are persecuting them.”

But is this accurate? Is this a full or correct assessment of what is happening? What if, for example, the right to decline service on the basis of gender orientation is a privilege, and an unjust privilege at that? What if – just imagine for a moment – if LGBTQ people had been systematically oppressed, opposed, feared, and discriminated against from the beginning in American history? The imaginative leap is difficult, because we know how welcomed LGBTQ people have been from the founding of our nation down to the present. But just imagine. Imagine that we had a system in place that privileged certain belief systems – Christianity, for example, of a heteronormative persuasion – to have a privileged place in our political and cultural life? What if that was a violation of the first amendment and the separation of church and state? What if, say, churches didn’t have to pay taxes? What if churches were supposed to avoid political entanglements as part of their 501c3 status but regularly ignored this law and the state didn’t enforce it? And what if, just by default, most Americans thought this was totally normal and a public good.

In that case, would the state saying you can’t discriminate against people on the basis of gender orientation be persecution? Or the removal of an undeserved and unjust privilege you shouldn’t have had in the first place? Is that persecution? Really? Are you sure?

It is obvious this is the removal of a privilege to discriminate, not persecution. Nobody is telling conservative, exclusionary Christians what to think. Nobody is telling them what correct dogma is. Nobody is telling their churches what to preach, or what they can say. They are merely laying down guidelines for what a person can do, in the public square, that place of lauded pluralism which conservatives have, in the last six months, suddenly fallen in love with.

All of these supposed persecutions have come in the public square, or when private religious institutions are using public money to proselytize. The state is merely saying, “If you want state or federal money, you must abide by state and federal non-discrimination guidelines.” In an act of unspeakable arrogance and privilege, conservative religious institutions have said, “No, we (and we alone) must get special dispensation to not comply with state and federal standards.” Or, in the case of private businesses, “We must have special dispensation to discriminate on the basis of gender identity (as well as race, sex, and disability, if we want).”

If these religious persons and institutions were arguing for something they didn’t already have, something that actually took their rights away under the law, they would be persecuted. But they are fighting to preserve a special exemption from the cooperative pluralism with which the rest of us get on with our lives. And they have the audacity, the singular arrogance, to suggest that this is persecution.

That’s pretty fucked up.

Meador, though, isn’t done. He accuses Gushee of the same sin with which every social reformer is accused by every recacitrant traditionalist since the beginning of the Enlightenment period. The sin of automatic progress (gasp! orchestral sting!)

Gushee, he claims, is dishonest in his piece down to his very language, because his language forms the situation as abstract historical forces of inevitable progress verses the bigoted enemies of progress refusing to bend before the inevitable.

This is an absurd accusation, and for a couple of reasons.

1) just because Gushee is speaking of cultural movement now doesn’t mean he isn’t aware of the efforts of reformers to bring us to this place. Meador’s suggestion is so silly it almost defies words. Does he really imagine Gushee is oblivious to the blood and sweat shed by reformers to win key victories and bring about meaningful reforms? Of course not, he’s just counting on his audience to simply nod their heads at the pathetic silliness of those stupid progressives.

2) there is such a thing as the weight of history. Far from inevitable, of course, but cultural phenomenons become phenomenons because at a certain point they take on a life of their own. “Ideas have consequences,” as one conservative writer (Richard Weaver) once put it. Some call it “the long tail,” others call it “the tipping point.” Gushee is doing little more than suggest that tipping point has been reached, or will be reached very soon. Maybe he’s right and maybe he’s wrong, but his point remains. The middle ground is vanishing, and soon everyone will have to take their sides.

Reformers have forced the issue. I don’t deny that, and I doubt Gushee would deny it either. This is how change comes. A few people point out inconsistencies in the mainstream belief system. A few become a lot. The huddle of a couple voices at the outskirts become a din. The arguments which Meador is making now were the same arguments made against Martin Luther King by the conservatives of his day, and against the abolitionists in their day, against the suffragettes in their day and the feminists in theirs. “Radicals have forced this upon us,” they whined, in every generation.

Whine all you like, but the question still stands: “Are LGBTQ people actually people, and do they deserve full protection under the law?” That is the question that stands to hand right now, and the culture is increasingly cool with saying “Yes” to both aspects of the question. Not because radicals have duped the unthinking masses into changing their philosophical worldview, but because reformers have pointed out the fundamental inconsistency at the heart of what has passed for mainstream thought for the last several hundred years.

You see, all people are given inalienable rights by the Declaration of Independence, and all people are granted full production under the Constitution. If LGBTQ people are really people, then if we really believe “all men are created equal,” then we don’t get to discriminate against LGBTQ people in America. Not in our public life, not by our government.

Conservatives are unable to answer both sides of that question with yes. They must find a way to answer with “Yes” to the first part (because the weight of history has passed the tipping point on calling LGBTQ people less than human or not deserving of being treated like human beings) but “no” to the second (because it is the last line of defense for preserving their privileged discrimination).

Of course, by answering no to the second part of the question (“do LGBTQ people deserve full protection under the law”), the conservative must internally answer no to the first part of the question (“Are LGBTQ people actually people”). If we are people, we deserve full protections against discrimination. If we do not deserve full productions against discrimination, we must not really be people, not in the full, healthy, teleological sense. Disordered people, like women with their small brains and frail natures, like slaves with their need for white masters to care for them because they cannot govern themselves, don’t have full rights, because they are somehow full of wrongs.

Meador’s post is full of further absurdities. Like the suggestion that progressives are somehow tied in their ideological agenda to capitalism – I rarely laughed harder at a suggestion. But let’s end on Meador’s beloved pluralism. Gushee’s piece, you might recall, begins with the loss of the middle ground. The middle ground is all I have heard conservatives talking about in the last year, the disappearing middle ground and why can’t we get back to it. But what middle ground is there between full personhood and full protection under the law, and some personhood and some protection under the law? Or perhaps, more starkly, what difference is there between some personhood and some protection and no personhood and no protection at all? When the issue revolves around how much discrimination should be allowed, there is little room for compromise. It isn’t that we’re losing the middle ground, it is that we’re realizing there never was any to start with.

We’ve tried the middle ground between full exclusion and full inclusion before. The answer of the conservatives was telling at that time, because it is the same compromise they are offering now. “Separate, but equal.”

 

 

What Justice Means

I am a fan of Walter Bruggemann, and I recently read his little book, Journey to the Common Good. This is an amazing primer on the central themes of the Bible. Along the way in this book, Bruggemann defines what the Hebrew words for “justice” are, and the definition might be the best I’ve ever read.

So here is YHWH’s triad, which we first might state in Hebrew: hesed, mispat, sedeqah.

Steadfast love (hesed) is to stand in solidarity, to honor commitments, to be reliable toward all the partners.

Justice (mispat) in the Old Testament concerns distribution in order to make sure that all members of the community have access to resources and goods for the sake of a viable life of dignity. In covenantal tradition the particular subject of YHWH’s justice is the triad “widow, orphan, immigrant,” those without leverage or muscle to sustain their own legitimate place in society.

Righteousness (sedeqah) concerns active intervention in social affairs, taking an initiative to intervene effectively in order to rehabilitate society, to respond to social grievance, and to correct every humanity-diminishing activity (pp. 62-63).

So the Old Testament’s words for justice mean solidarity, redistribution, and activism.

 

Troubles in Little Anglicanism

I have been drawn to the Episcopal church for a variety of reasons, but its inherent calm, ecumenical spirit, and tempered reasonableness have been among those reasons. Its heart for an inclusive gospel that sees us all as children of God has been another.

I am about two months away from being confirmed in The Episcopal Church.

Today at the global gathering of the Primates (Bishops) of the global Anglican Communion, the bishops did two horrifying things.

First, they voted overwhelmingly (by a two-thirds majority) to reaffirm and uphold the exclusionary tradition of exclusive heterosexual marriage as “between one man and one woman.”

Second, they voted to punish The Episcopal Church for changing its church laws on marriage to include marriage equality by suspending them from membership in the global Anglican Communion for three years. Basically, this means that TEC is now only an “observer” in the communion, not a full participant. They cannot vote on doctrinal or polity matters, nor represent the AC in ecumenical or interfaith discussions. Further, a Task Force will be appointed to “rebuild trust and healing” from the hurt that apparently refusing to discriminate against God’s LGBTQ children has caused the bristly global Bishops.

This whole process is a circus show and it is insulting, not to mention a shameless power-grab by the hierarchy of the church, which conservatives have been fighting to reclaim for at least 40 years. A lot of people don’t know this, but in the Episcopal Church there are two voting bodies, one of which represents the Bishops and the other represents the laity. No doctrinal decisions can be made without both of these houses agreeing with one another (similar to the House of Lords and House of Commons in the British Parliament). In the TEC, both of these bodies agreed to change the Canon on marriage to support marriage equality. By suspending the TEC, the AC is trying to discipline the TEC for a decision that was the will not just of the Bishops but of the people. It is an attempt by the hierarchy to claim power over this democratic process.

But this will also not change the TEC’s mind on the matter of same-sex marriage. We will not be threatened, we will not be bullied, and we will not be broken. We will cling to the gospel, which demands all people be welcome and proclaims liberation to those laboring under abusive tradition for centuries. As Jim Naughton, former canon of the Archdiocese of Washington, said:

“We can accept these actions with grace and humility but the Episcopal Church is not going back,” Naughton said. “We can’t repent what is not sin.”

Guns and Prayers

After the San Bernardino shooting, conservative GOP lawmakers rushed to tweet out thoughts and prayers to the victims and the community. They were quickly called to the carpet by twitter, who pointed out that prayers, if they are all we get, are worthless.

Cue the strangled wail of evangelicaldom, as though a great many voices cried out in horror, and were suddenly offended.

Evangelicals rushed to point out that prayers aren’t worthless, and to once more arrogantly presume that anybody who says anything against prayer must be a flesh-eating atheist.

Of course, nobody ever said that prayer was worthless. I’ve been following the progressive social media and web for quite a while now, and I have not seen one single person suggest prayer was worthless.

If evangelicals could get beyond their own shrill fit of the vapors, they might notice that.

What progressives said is that prayer is nice and all, but we need more than prayer. Notice the basic difference here, which conservatives seem unable to grasp. They want more than prayer, not less than prayer.

But basic logic and paying attention to what people say isn’t really in the evangelical wheelhouse, especially not when they can get the base all fired up over all them damn atheists waging their imaginary war on Christianity.

Evangelicals have dubbed this act of pointing out that we need more than prayer to be “prayer-shaming,” as asinine and absurd a reframing as one is likely to see, but one which plays into the evangelical-conservative alliance of delusional victimology and imaginary cultural persecution.

Quite frankly, I’m fed up with their nonsense and if it takes a verbal drubbing to knock some sense into them, then so be it, because this bullshit has about run its course.

Charles Pierce has some choice words for the evangelical wailers over at Esquire, and they are well worth reading.

It’s long past the time to break the power and influence held over our politics by a splinter faction of one form of American Christianity. It’s long past time to make refashioning the Gospel into talking-points—​and, worse, a vehicle for ratfcking—​a political liability rather than a political asset. It’s long past time to ignore the bleating of self-professed Christians who specialize in marinating in their victimology, who build their own Golgothas, and who drive the nails into their own palms. If so-called “prayer-shaming” is the first step in that direction, then Chris Murphy’s entire career in politics has been worthwhile.

I am heartily fed up with this nonsense. I am heartily fed up with people whose personal relationships with their personal Lords And Saviors lead them to knuckle the poor, subjugate women, brag about their gunmanship, and topple inconvenient regimes that happen to be sitting on an ocean of oil.

Better words may never be written about the present issue of “prayer-shaming,” and in sum, the fact that progressives (long believed the bastion of atheists and the dreaded secularists by evangelicals) have exposed the blatant hypocrisy at the root of evangelical life and evangelical theology.

The offense runs deep and wide. Progressives cannot be right, by definition, for evangelicals, and so to be called on the carpet for their shit so completely and so starkly by their enemies cannot be tolerated. So they push back about the value of prayer, completely missing the point that nobody was attacking prayer in the first place.

All they do is reinforce the cultural belief that all evangelicals want to do is pray, and this exposes the pietistic heart of evangelical theology they have been at great pains in the last thirty years to pretend does not exist.

Yet, clearly, prayers are not enough. Jesus himself was the first prayer-shamer:

And when you pray, do not be like the hypocrites, for they love to pray standing in the synagogues and on the street corners to be seen by others. Truly I tell you, they have received their reward in full (Matt. 6:5)

13Woe to you, teachers of the law and Pharisees, you hypocrites! You shut the door of the kingdom of heaven in people’s faces. You yourselves do not enter, nor will you let those enter who are trying to.

¹⁵ “Woe to you, teachers of the law and Pharisees, you hypocrites! You travel over land and sea to win a single convert, and when you have succeeded, you make them twice as much a child of Gehenna as you are.

²³ “Woe to you, teachers of the law and Pharisees, you hypocrites! You give a tenth of your spices—mint, dill and cumin. But you have neglected the more important matters of the law—justice, mercy and faithfulness. You should have practiced the latter, without neglecting the former. ²⁴ You blind guides! You strain out a gnat but swallow a camel.

²⁵ “Woe to you, teachers of the law and Pharisees, you hypocrites! You clean the outside of the cup and dish, but inside they are full of greed and self-indulgence. ²⁶ Blind Pharisee! First clean the inside of the cup and dish, and then the outside also will be clean.

²⁷ “Woe to you, teachers of the law and Pharisees, you hypocrites! You are like whitewashed tombs, which look beautiful on the outside but on the inside are full of the bones of the dead and everything unclean. ²⁸ In the same way, on the outside you appear to people as full of justice but on the inside you are full of hypocrisy and wickedness.

²⁹ “Woe to you, teachers of the law and Pharisees, you hypocrites! You build tombs for the prophets and decorate the graves of the just. ³⁰ And you say, ‘If we had lived in the days of our ancestors, we would not have taken part with them in shedding the blood of the prophets.’ ³¹ So you testify against yourselves that you are the descendants of those who murdered the prophets. ³² Go ahead, then, and complete what your ancestors started!

³³ “You snakes! You brood of vipers! How will you escape being condemned to Gehenna? (Matt. 23:13-15, 23-31)

Prayer without deeds is worthless, as is evangelical theology if it does not take immediate pains to reform itself.

¹⁴ What good is it, my brothers and sisters, if someone claims to have faith but has no deeds? Can such faith save them? ¹⁵ Suppose a brother or a sister is without clothes and daily food. ¹⁶ If one of you says to them, “Go in peace; keep warm and well fed,” but does nothing about their physical needs, what good is it? ¹⁷ In the same way, faith by itself, if it is not accompanied by action, is dead. (James 2:14-17)

The Problem is All the Liberal-Communists

Zizek reflects on how we are distracted by being thrown from crisis to crisis rather than evaluating the broader issues that give rise to the crises themselves: the real problem is capital and its ability to co-opt anything that sets out to resist it.

It is the self-propelling metaphysical dance of capital that runs the show, that provides the key to real-life developments and catastrophes. Therein resides the fundamental systemic violence of capitalism, much more uncanny than any direct pre-capitalist socio-ideological violence: this violence is no longer attributable to concrete individuals and their “evil” intentions, but is purely “objective,” systemic, anonymous. (Zizek, Violence, pp. 12-13).

In short, because nobody is directly responsible for such “objective” forms of violence, they tend to be more or less invisible to us.

Zizek points out that there has been a great merger between the Right and the Left under the shadow of global capitalism. Capitalists like Bill Gates can now fund anti-capitalist poverty and development programs.

The new liberal communists are, of course, our usual suspects: Bill Gates and George Soros, the CEOs of Google, IBM, Intel, eBay, as well as their court philosophers, most notably the journalist Thomas Friedman. What makes this group interesting is that their ideology has become all but indistinguishable from the new breed of anti-globalist leftist radicals… Both the old right, with its ridiculous belief in authority and order and parochial patriotism, and the old left with its capitalised Struggle against Capitalism, are today’s true conservatives fighting their shadow-theatre struggles and out of touch with the new realities. (Zizek, Violence, p. 16).

These new conservatives have managed to unite the old Right with the old Left in the favor of capitalism itself. State redistribution has failed, or so the argument goes, and thus the only means to redistribute wealth is by volunteer charity from the wealthy and the corporate powers. The leftist radicals inherited or built their giant companies and now operate a kind of capitalist-communist charity fund that focuses on counteracting subjective violence: homelessness, poverty, racism, rape, etc. Such a position is not laudatory because it refuses to evaluate what causes the problems of poverty and h0melessness in the first place. Capitalism causes the problem and is, magically, somehow, the solution as well.

We need to ask ourselves whether there really is something new here. Is it not merely that an attitude which in the wild old capitalist days of the U.S. industrial barons, was something of an exception (although not as much as it may appear) has not gained universal currency? Good old Andrew Carnegie employed a private army brutally to suppress organised labor in his steelworks and then distributed large parts of his wealth to educational, artistic, and humanitarian causes. A man of steel, he proved he had a heart of gold. In the same way, today’s liberal communists give away with one hand what they first took with the other. (Zizek, Violence, p. 21).

This is why the delicate liberal-communist–frightened, caring, fighting violence–and the blind fundamentalist exploding in rage are two sides of the same coin. While they fight subjective violence, liberal communists are the very agents of the structural violence which creates the conditions for the explosions of subjective violence. The same philanthropists who give millions for AIDS or education in tolerance have ruined the lives of thousands through financial speculation and thus created the conditions for the very intolerance that is being fought. (Zizek, Violence, pp. 36-37)

We should have no illusions: liberal communists are the enemy of every progressive struggle today. … Precisely because they want to resolve all the secondary malfunctions of the global system, liberal communists are the direct embodiment of what is wrong with the system as such. (Zizek, Violence, p. 37)

How Our Obession with Violence Masks Violence

Continental philosopher and public intellectual Slavoj Zizek is always worth reading. I am working through his short book Violence: Six Sideways Reflections as part of a research project for my next book. In this book, Zizek begins by pointing out that liberals (Zizek himself is a hard leftist) are, generally speaking, entirely preoccupied with what he terms “subjective” violence. Subjective violence is direct violence, crime, assault, rape, etc. He delineates three types of violence: subjective, objective, and symbolic.

Opposing all forms of violence, from direct, physical violence (mass murder, terror) to ideological violence (racism, incitement, sexual discrimination), seems to be the main preoccupation of the tolerant liberal attitude that predominates today. An SOS call sustains such talk, drowning out all other approaches: everything else can and has to wait . . . Is there not something suspicious, indeed symptomatic, about this focus on subjective violence – that violence which is enacted by social agents, evil individuals, disciplined repressive apparatuses, fanatical crowds? Doesn’t it desperately try to distract our attention from the true locus of trouble, by obliterating from view other forms of violence and thus actively participating in them? (Zizek, Violence, pp. 10-11)

Obviously the unspoken answer to this question is “Yes.” Liberalism’s obsession with subjective violence can be observed by following the news cycle, where activists are thrown from one crisis event to another, never really slowing down to analyze all of the larger pieces and the bigger problems. I noticed this in myself just this year, when the news cycle careened from refugee crises to the student protests to the Paris shootings, to the BlackLivesMatter shootings, and back to fears about refugees.

As progressives, particularly as progressive Christians, we need to do a better job avoiding getting caught up in each crisis thrust at us by the 24-hour news cycle and dig beneath the surface to the unifying whole, the deeper violence that goes unobserved by most, the violence of our cultural, economic, political, and social systems.

The point is not to ignore the visible crises, nor to abandon desperate refugees (to use the most recent example), but rather to contexualize them within a larger picture. We cannot have a larger battle plan for cultural and political change when we are constantly jumping from fire to fire.

This is how our obsession with violence actually masks violence. Subjective violence is simply the most visible form of violence, and therefore the most obvious. But our obsession with subjective violence also prevents us from developing ways of exposing and dealing with the objective violence that lies behind subjective violence, disguised as a public good because it is part of the normal functioning of the system, and the symbolic violence that ultimately lies behind all violence, the violence of our symbolic landscape, our metaphors and language categories.

Manhood vs. Jesus

There has been a long history of “masculine” Christianity in the life of the modern church. The fact that the Christian faith has been the refuge for women and other minorities and vulnerable, weak elements of society has created an aura of anxiety around the men that are active in Church life. They fret about masculinity, manhood and the faith, fearing the “feminization” of the Church, nursing the lurking suspicion that perhaps in the end it is feminine itself.

Men have done a number of things to remedy this situation, but they all ultimately boil down to a “re-masculization” of the faith, emphasizing themes of capitalism, warfare, and patriarchy. From Billy Sunday and Billy Graham to the contemporary Quiverfull movement, Doug Wilson, and beyond, this movement has tried to rediscover, define, and enforce masculinity in counter-distinction to femininity, as a vital need within the Church.

Typically, this is expressed in the traditional masculine roles of Protector, Provider, and Progenitor. As I was thinking about these categories today, I suddenly realized how far these are from Jesus’s vision as presented to us in the New Testament. Christianity, then, innately destabilizes traditional male and female roles by summoning women to ministry, service, and education, and by summoning men to surrender their instinct to self-defense, capitalism, and patriarchy.

Man as Protector. Here the man is seen as guardian, the paternalistic defender of the patriarchal household of wife, property, and possessions. Jesus undercuts this instinct when he summons Christians to the life of nonviolence and non-retaliation. “But I say to you, do not resist with violence the harmful person; but whoever slaps you on your right cheek, turn the other to him also. If anyone wants to sue you and take your shirt, let him have your coat also. Whoever forces you to go one mile, go with him two. Give to him who asks of you, and do not turn away from him who wants to borrow from you,” (Matt. 5:39-42). While the male instinct is the assertion and defense of rights and property, Jesus asserts that the opposite is characteristic in the Kingdom of God.

Man as Provider. In this perspective, the man is seen as the source of provision for himself and his household. Implicit in this idea is the concept of capitalist acquisition, accumulation, and consumption, the making of money and the provision of a household for the subservient wife and children. The degree to which our society insists this is a matter of honor for men (while simultaneously abandoning much of it in practice) shows how ingrained it is in our thinking. Jesus challenges this directly. Jesus himself was not a provider, but received the hospitality and financial support of others, including women (Luke 8:3). He advocated this life for his followers: “You cannot serve God and wealth. For this reason I say to you, do not be worried about your life, as to what you will eat or what you will drink; nor for your body, as to what you will put on. Is not life more than food, and the body more than clothing? Look at the birds of the air, that they do not sow, nor reap nor gather into barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not worth much more than they?” (Matt. 6:24-26). The pattern here is mutual support and a radical trust in God, not accumulation and provision.

Man as Progenitor. Here the man’s power is felt in his sexual veracity and his ability to procreate – hence the struggle of men with impotence and other sexual issues. Rather than seeing sex and marriage in egalitarian, equalitarian terms, it becomes a means of planting one’s seed, of “taking” a wife and fertilizing her garden, an instinctual regression to patriarchy, however guided by evolutionary necessity. Even here, however, Jesus reconstructs our view. “But seek first His kingdom and His justice, and all these things will be added to you. So do not worry about tomorrow; for tomorrow will care for itself. Each day has enough trouble of its own,” (Matt. 6:33-34).

Jesus, as is apparent from this brief glance, radically un-centers the capitalist, middle-class lifestyle into which modern Christians are desperately seeking to accommodate him, and the patriarchical assumptions that sit behind it. He calls us into a vastly different type of community, organized around a revolutionary set of assumptions that challenge the cultural locations of both men and women. He is not pro-masculine or pro-feminine, but beyond both, a new way of living in which there is “neither male nor female” (Gal. 3:25).

Leviticus 18 and Homosexuality

Possibly the best known and most controversial passage in Scripture concerning homosexuality and the LGBTQ community is Leviticus 18:22: “You shall not lie with a male as with a woman; it is an abomination.” Whenever this subject comes up, this verse is the first stop for many Christians.

I believe we have not reflected carefully enough on the context of this verse and its parallel in Lev. 20:13. I believe this is true of both those who disagree with homosexual activity and those who see no conflict between it and

The Structure of Leviticus

In order to get a handle on Leviticus 18 (and 20) we have to start by seeing where they fit in the overall structure of the book of Leviticus. The book of Leviticus is designed to lay out religious life in the Promised Land, to show Israel what God has done to allow them to remain in His good standing.

The book is structured in this way:

1. Leviticus 1-7

These chapters describe the five different sacrifices and what they were for. Thus, they are Tabernacle-centric.

2. Leviticus 8-16

Scholar James Jordan has seen a recapitulation of Genesis 2 in Leviticus 8-10. “Aaron is set up as another ‘new Adam’ in the completed Garden, and we find the sequence reeated. If the Tabernacle is a Garden-sanctuary for God, then the High Priest is a new Adam,” thus allowing us to “read Leviticus 8 as a re-creation passage,” (Jordan, Covenant Sequence, 26, 27). Chapters 11-16 concern defilement of the Tabernacle and how God has provided a means of restoration to fellowship and a return of access to His presence in the Tabernacle, climaxing with the Day of Atonement. The worship of Israel is still in view.

3. Leviticus 17-22

This section also concerns the worship of Israel, beginning with sacrifices and ending with the duties of the priests, and between them covering various sins that would result in the loss of covenant privilege and result in God refusing Israel access to His presence in the Tabernacle.

4. Leviticus 23

This single chapter makes up its own section of the book, covering Israel’s festivals and feast days, their liturgical calendar for the year, and therefore is also concerned with worship issues.

5. Leviticus 24-27

This final section is also dealing with Tabernacle-sanctuary issues, from the showbread and lampstand in the Tabernacle and blasphemy (ch. 24) to idolatry, sabbath-keeping, and the connection of the land to the Tabernacle (ch. 26-27). Between is the liberation of Jubilee (ch. 25), which prevented injustice from overtaking the people.

The point of this brief glance at the structure of Leviticus is to point out that it is dealing entirely with Israel as the priestly people, focused on their worship and how their whole society revolved around the Tabernacle, which was its center. This is an unfamiliar idea to us, but to Israel the Torah laws were entirely religious in nature and intent, and were entirely caught up in the structures, life, and worship of God in the Tabernacle.

I draw our attention to this because so many Christians blithely ignore this fact when they try to apply the laws found in Leviticus to modern society, not realizing that the intent behind the law was Israel’s worship in that time and place, and that this must be taken into account to contextualize them. Everything in the land was regulated by the Tabernacle, even the value of your house, people, or animals (Lev. 27). This is most important in examining when it comes to Leviticus 18 and LGBTQ issues.

The Context of Leviticus 18

As we have seen, the main theme of Leviticus is “right worship,” and the section of chapters 17-22 is concerned with this very thing. Chapter 17 concerns Israel’s refusal to “sacrifice their sacrifice to goat demons, after whom they whore,” (Lev. 17:7). The importance of this declaration cannot be overstated, and is made clear by the special designation following it: “This shall be a statute forever for them throughout their generations.”

This theme of worship is continued in Leviticus 18, where Yahweh declares, “You shall not do as they do in the land of Egypt, where you lived, and you shall not do as they do in the land of Canaan, to which I am bringing you,” (v. 3). Thus, what God is principally addressing in what follows is the behavior of the pagan nations around Israel. What follows is a lengthy passage against incest (vv. 6-20), which probably refers primarily to the worship rites of Baal and Ashtaroth and Moloch, which involved a variety of sexual practices, including cult prostitution.

The religious context is reinforced immediately following, when Yahweh declares that “You shall not give any of your children to offer them to Moloch and so profane the name of your God: I am Yahweh,” (v. 21). Immediately following this reference to the pagan worship practices of Israel’s neighbors comes the condemnation of male homosexuality: “You shall not lie with a male as with a woman,” (v. 22). The next verse concerns bestiality (v. 23), which was also involved in the worship practice of many pagan nations of the time period.

I have seen many opponents to the LGBTQ community make much of the fact that the focus is on ejection from the land in the latter portion of the chapter, rather than expulsion from the Tabernacle (vv. 24-30), as though this proved they were universal in scope rather than focused on the worship practices of the nations around Israel and were simply the expression of idolatry at the time. But it is important not to drive to hard a wedge between the Tabernacle, the land, and the people, as all symbolized one another. All Israelites were priests (Ex. 19:6), after all, and the whole Promised Land is a new Garden-Sanctuary, like the Garden of Eden (Joel 2:3).

Most importantly, it should be noted that all of the practices referred to in Leviticus 18 would make Israel “unclean” (tame), a word that refers to ceremonial or religious uncleanness (v. 30). That is, such activity results in ritual defilement, essentially banning the practitioner from worship in the Tabernacle, unable to “draw near” to God in worship, and is a technical word in Leviticus for ritual defilement (Lev. 5:2-3; 7:19-21; 10:10), used to describe unauthorized worship or things that would cause an Israelite to become unauthorized to remain withing the priestly people, such as the unclean animals (ch. 11), leprosy (ch. 13-14), and human discharges (ch. 15).

Leviticus 20 is parallel to Leviticus 18, but simply includes penalties for the actions described in chapter 18. It also begins with a warning against worship of Moloch: “Any one of the people of Israel of the strangers who sojourn in Israel who gives any of his children to Moloch shall surely be put to death,” which will “make my sanctuary unclean (tame) and to profane My holy Name,” (Lev. 20:2, 3). Thus, we see the inherent and organic connection between the Tabernacle and the land – such false worship makes both unclean (Lev. 18:27-28; 20:3). The focus is on sanctuary access and how idolatry blocks access to God and to proper worship. Verse 7 tells Israel, in contrast to uncleanness, that they are to “consecrate yourselves (qadash), therefore, and be holy (qadosh), for I am Yahweh your God.” The Hebrew qadash and qadosh are closely connected, and refer to ceremonial cleanness and purity, a person or object set apart for holy work, ordination to an office, etc. That is, we are still dealing with religious work and worship.

This is the context in which Leviticus 18 addresses this issue. “If a man lies with a male as a woman, both of them have committed an abomination.” The context is clearly a reference to temple prostitution, as an act of idolatry. The chapter concludes by referring to the clean/unclean rites (v. 25) and repeats the call to be holy and consecrated for God’s work and for access to the Tabernacle (v. 26).

This reading is reinforced by the prevailing question that not all same-sex activity is prohibited. Both Leviticus 18 and 20 refer only to male same-sex activity in worship. No prohibition of female-female sexual activity exists in the Old Testament. If God were issuing a universal decree that was to span all ages and times and periods and cultures, he would have prohibited all same-sex activity rather than only half of it. Opponents of the LGBTQ community have happily ignored the Bible in this regard, and issue sweeping condemnations of lesbians despite their having never been condemned by Scripture. Seeing these passages as references to cult prostitution, on the other hand, makes better sense of the laws in their original context.

A further question. Deuteronomy repeats the laws of Exodus, Leviticus, and Numbers on the eve of the conquest of Canaan, so why does it not repeat the law against male homosexuality? It repeats and transforms the Torah, but does not repeat this particular law. Why? On the traditional reading, this would make no sense. But Deuteronomy does include a prohibition against cult prostitution. “None of the daughters of Israel shall be a cult prostitute, and none of the sons of Israel shall be a cult prostitute,” (Deut. 23:17). If Leviticus 18 and 20 refer to cult prostitution, as I have argued, then Deuteronomy does offer a parallel to the passages in Leviticus.

So what is the upshot to all of this? Simply that we have been reading Leviticus 18 and 20 very sloppily, ignoring the central context that grounds our reading of the passage. God is not offering an absolute prohibition on same-sex activity, but instead is making an absolute prohibition against idolatry, using the common activities of pagan ritual worship in the Ancient Near East. He is neither prohibiting a same-sex orientation nor same-sex activity, but cult prostitution. These passages, therefore, have no application to those with same-sex attractions, except to say that they should not engage in ancient pagan worship rites (which would apply equally to those with other-sex attraction too).

Gay Weddings and Public Business

The Christian Post reports that a Christian cake-making business in Oregon was forced to shut down after they denied service to a lesbian couple. Right up front, we need a few comments. Firstly, it is sad and unfortunate that they were forced to close their business (though they are continuing to make cakes through an in-home business). It is also unfortunate that the lesbian couple behaved so poorly and tried to destroy their business after being turned down.

But we also have to think about what it means to operate a business.

Many Christians I know are outraged at this, which they see as flagrant persecution. But is this really what is going on? I don’t think it is.

It is unfortunate it came down to losing their shop over the conflict, but this Christian family business essentially destroyed itself for no particularly compelling reason. Some readers will now understandably bristle, but it remains true that if they had simply made a cake the issue wouldn’t have even arisen.

So the question we now must ask is: is it lawful for Christians who disagree with same-sex activity and civil unions to provide services to the gay couples who want to hire them?

I believe it is lawful. And here’s why.

Homosexuality does not occupy center stage in Christian sexual ethics, and the issue has been so politicized that we can’t even seem to have a sane discussion of the issue any more. Our heightened and intense response to everything having to do with the issue is not really due to Christian sexual teachings, and comes more from the fact that we have elevated the conflict in our own minds and rhetoric. Jesus never mentioned homosexuality, and the verses that address it are few and far between and never singled out for attention. This should cue us into the fact that our ethical compass has extremely different emphases than Jesus’s had.

The objection I hear most often is “I don’t want to support what they’re doing,” or “I don’t want to seem like I’m supporting them.” But this raises the question of what a business is. When someone comes to you to contract your business for the provision of certain services for which you will be fairly compensated, can your acceptance of that business constitute “support”? No. Can a Christian mechanic start deciding whether or not to fix the car of the Baptist that came into his shop because he himself supports infant baptism? Should a Christian doctor start deciding not to help patients of other religions? Should Christian airline pilots refuse to transport homosexual passengers? More to the point, should a Christian car mechanic refuse the business of a gay couple that brought their car in for repairs? Can that be taken as “support” for their lifestyle?

So why does the situation magically change when we talk about Christian wedding photographers and cake-makers? How many heterosexual couples do they agree with? How many are addicted to porn? How many have fits of rage? How many are non-Christians? The point is simple: if you’re going to turn away business by people you don’t agree with, then you should turn away everyone you don’t agree with.

This is why Christians will lose this particular argument. Because when you say you are turning away people you don’t agree with but only turn away certain people you don’t agree with, you are behaving like a hypocrite. This form of public hypocrisy is also called discrimination. This is not an issue of “standing up for the truth.” It is not a matter of “religious freedom” or “persecution.” It is, however, a matter of Christians playing the victim card. It is an issue of Christians being upset at losing their privileged status.

These Christians don’t want to be seen supporting same-sex marriage. They don’t want to seem like they’re supporting it. These same Christians probably wouldn’t want to seem to support prostitution by eating and hang out with prostitutes either. Unfortunately, this is exactly what Jesus did. The question “What would Jesus do” looms uncomfortably large over this whole discussion. The Kingdom belongs to the ugly and the broken and the unworthy, not for the powerful and respectable. Over and over Jesus says, “I desire mercy, not sacrifice.” Paul goes so far as to say that acceptance comes first; acceptance and mercy are designed to lead to repentance, not the other way around (Rom. 2:5).

Stop Trying to Save the World, Please!

Stop trying to save the world and just do what Yahweh requires. Let Him do the saving.

If recent theologians like Peter Leithart, Stanley Haurwas and others are correct (and I believe they are) in understanding the Church to be an alternative polis, a rival city to the city of the world, an alternative community comprised of the baptized, then this has far reaching consequences for how the Church behaves in the world.

Most Christians in America today are only all-too aware that the Bible has political consequences and implications, and many pages have been written on how Christians should behave in the world. This cottage industry has mostly been framed by the question of what Christians should oppose in our culture. This has naturally led to an invisible assumption that the problems with the Church and with the culture are entirely (or mostly) external. So we close ranks, we insist more and more vehemently that Christians look or talk or dress like this and not like that, and true Christians think this and not that. The net result has been that we see those who disagree with us as our enemies, people to be “countered” and “refuted” logically and rhetorically. Bury them in footnotes and quotations and propositional analyses.

In short, all of these issues are caused by our need to save the world from itself. We’re supposed to have a “cultural impact” and straighten them out. A position which naturally allows us to believe we’ve got it all together (after all, we’re the ones helping them shape up) and that we must fix the world.

But understanding that the Church is an alternative polis, a city within the city, allows us to see the Church differently. It means, among other things, that the Church is independent from the culture. Not in a self-contained way, but in the sense of “sphere sovereignty.” A non-Christian is not under the jurisdiction of the elders of the local Church in the same way as a baptized member of the congregation. This implies that our laws are not for them. Christians spend so much of their time criticizing non-believers for not following the code of believers that it is a wonder this hasn’t occurred to any of them yet. The ethics of the Bible, and of the NT, are not for unbelievers or unbelieving culture.

But, some will counter with, doesn’t God want to see all the nations bend the knee to Christ and live that way? Of course. But those nations come into the Kingdom first. They become part of this alternative community, this rival polis before the way of life of that polis is applied to them.

What about the Old Testament? others will ask. Surely the Old Testament pictures Israel as a nation obeying God’s law and living according to His requirements. Why can’t we just apply those laws to our own cultural politics? Because, the OT polis becomes the NT polis. Those political requirements and penalties are transferred to the Church. Capital punishment in the OT becomes excommunication in the NT. The Church is Israel, a nation, a polis.

I think so many Christians get caught up in (to use Niebhur’s terms) “cultural transformation” that they develop a messianic complex. It’s down to us to save the world, to remake the world in our own image, to fight for truth, justice and the American way. This creates nervous, jumpy Christians, people who are hyper-critical, blind to their own faults and sins, and who turn unbelievers into targets. Add in an unhealthy dose of Enlightenment philosophy that focuses entirely on the life of the mind, on refutation and propositions, and you have perfectly captured the last few generations of evangelicals.

But if the Church really is a polis in any real sense, a city in its own right, then this is all wrong. If our ethical life is intended for us and not for the world, then we need to stop comparing the world to it, and stop trying to shove it down their throat without the requisite transformation by Christ. It is an odd irony that pursuit of “cultural transformation” results in the opposite, but the historical consequences of cultural transformation are fairly clear. This term means treating the Church as if she is not a polis at all, but an add-on, a nice addition to a culture that neither needs or wants it. It results in the pursuit of the levers of cultural and political power. We think we can climb aboard and drive the Mammon-mobile better than the Mammonites can. But this is all wrong. Jesus said to ignore the Mammon-mobile, and concentrate on driving the Church instead. You can’t drive a Gentile car without becoming like a Gentile.

But doesn’t this result in ignoring the world, letting it get worse and worse? Isn’t this some kind of gnostic retreat from the world and from influence? Some Christians, especially of the Reformed variety, are very fearful of this. But I don’t think so. To stop trying to save the world, to refuse to participate in the polis of Mammon in this way actually has good results. The sinner and the sick cease to be our enemies in a philosophical and worldview conflict, and instead become the wounded and the broken we are called upon to serve. It rehumanizes those people we have dehumanized. Instead of trying to fix the head alone, the Church would become a place that provides healing and care for the whole human person. It means that the Church would live like it was its own polis, a community of people living the way Jesus told us to, together in true community, practicing such radical sharing that there are many loaves and fishes left over for the broken and the hungry and the needy and the poor.

Maybe if we lived like the Church, we would be recognized as the Church by the world, as the Church once was known in her early days. Maybe the way to save the world is to stop trying to save it and just live like the Church. God will bring the nations in when He is ready.