Albert Mohler has a lengthy piece at his Web site that attacks the recent REVOICE conference, which aimed at finding a way to bridge the distance between LGBTQs and Christianity. Mohler’s sniffish view of the conference was predictable and his arguments aren’t very interesting, but for this: They exemplify the intellectual corruption of theology, and the harm it does in the real world.
To begin, a handful of settled facts about reality; if you don’t know these things, you might be tricked into believing that Mohler has established his premises and is an intellectually serious man.
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Nobody has ever offered a scintilla of objective evidence that there are any supernatural beings, including the Christian god, and modern physics has shown that the universe could have come into being without the prompting of a supernatural actor.
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There is no objective evidence that the Bible is of supernatural origin or inspiration.
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There was no Adam and Eve, which means there was no Fall, and there is no such thing as Original Sin.
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There is a complex of traits which comprise sexuality, including gender, sexual orientation, and gender identity. These are not hard-coded switches in our DNA; they are switches set according to the interaction of our DNA with the chemical environment of the developing fetus.
Mohler’s discussion of REVOICE ignores all these settled, established facts.
This revolution requires a total redefinition of morality, cultural authority, personal identity, and more. The revolution requires a new vocabulary and a radically revised dictionary. Ultimately, the moral revolutionaries seek to redefine reality itself.
Inexplicably, Mohler is nearly correct here — mainly, I suppose, because the statement doesn’t rest on his debunked premises. There is a moral revolution afoot in the narrow sense that the rules are changing, but the so-called revolution is grounded upon the same purpose that morality has always served — the flourishing of the person, the tribe, the community, the larger society. When men lived in tribes and its perpetuation required all hands on deck — so to speak — the condemnation of homosexuality made a certain crude sense.
Then Judah said to Onan, “Go in to your brother’s wife and perform the duty of a brother-in-law to her, and raise up offspring for your brother.” But Onan knew that the offspring would not be his. So whenever he went in to his brother’s wife he would waste the semen on the ground, so as not to give offspring to his brother. And what he did was wicked in the sight of the Lord, and he put him to death also.
A fertile woman should not be wasted, and a family name should be preserved — and neither should the means of impregnating her be wasted. The moral argument against same-sex relations is grounded in the perpetuation of the tribe — something we needn’t worry about today.
That moral rule from Bronze Age tribal life simply does not obtain nowadays. In ‘redefining’ morality, REVOICE’s ambition is to make morality serve its true purpose — human flourishing.
And on it goes, a regular cavalcade of nonsense grounded on faulty premises. And because of those faulty premises, Mohler intends that the Southern Baptist Convention should continue inflicting needless psychic pain on the blameless — and they will.