Michael-in-Norfolk points today toward a piece written for the Washington Post by an unusually thoughtful evangelical pastor struggling to reconcile the traditional Christian teachings about homosexuality with the evidence of his own eyes. Read Michael’s piece, and the column he’s taking off from; both are worthwhile.
Here’s a particularly striking note in Michael’s commentary:
Gays are defined solely by how and with whom we have sex. Emotional bonds, common hopes and aspirations – indeed love – are all utterly removed from the equation. Why?
This time last year I was reading my way through John Calvin’s Institutes of the Christian Religion, and I was dumbfounded by some of what I found there. Calvin was very definite and no-nonsense on the matter of sex and marriage: The conjugal relationship is a cosmic accommodation so that those not blessed with the gift of celibacy don’t do something worse.
The charm of reading John Calvin is that he utterly lacks common sense and ordinary decency, so he will say frankly what most, more prudent contemporary preachers try to steer you toward but won’t say explicitly. In Christian teaching, marriage is not about mutual loyalty and shared goals and building satisfying lives together; it’s about sex.
As the law under which man was created was not to lead a life of solitude, but enjoy a help-meet for him — and ever since he fell under the curse the necessity for this mode of life is increased — the Lord made the requisite provision for us in this respect by the institution of marriage, which, entered into under his authority, he has also sanctified with his blessing. Hence, it is evident, that any mode of cohabitation different from marriage is cursed in his sight, and the conjugal relation was ordained as a necessary means of preventing us from giving way to unbridled lust.
For people raised to take their piety seriously, marriage is sex. Period. They will not, cannot, recognize “emotional bonds, common hopes and aspirations” in gay relationships because they are scarcely capable of acknowledging them in their own relationships. Marriage is cosmic permission for sexual intercourse, and that’s it.
It is not mutual loyalty. No. Only God gets your loyalty. It is not shared ambitions. No. God tells you what are your ambitions, according to the role assigned you in his oh-so-mysterious plan.
We are all of us familiar with the clerically-mandated hierarchy of properly ordered values:
- God
- Family
- Country
The implicit, never-stated corollary is this: Putting family first threatens your salvation.
And just in case some folk don’t pick-up on that, there is the relentless reminder that Abraham is amongst the greatest men to ever live because he betrayed his family on command.
At the bottom of all this, of course, there is no more than Bishop John Spong’s observation: “Religion is in the control business” — and healthy marriages, their mutual loyalty and shared ambitions, are a threat to clerical control. It really is as simple and cynical as that, and no coincidence that evangelicals, raised from infancy to be suspicious of corporeal entanglements, have the highest divorce rate in the country.
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