Once upon a time, my niece dated a Muslim—even worse (in her mother’s view), they lived together as an unmarried couple. My sister and her husband, both of the fundamentalist Christian bent, reacted in different ways. Whenever they would visit my niece and her boyfriend, my brother-in-law would stay at a motel, refusing to give a perceived stamp of approval by staying at their home. My sister, on the other hand, gladly stayed in their home and accepted their hospitality.
I asked her why she did this when she clearly disapproved of the relationship.
“Well, how am I going to show him Christ’s love if I won’t stay with him?” she said.
That reply sounded innocuous enough—but the undertone was completely insidious.
She engaged with my niece’s boyfriend, not so much to show him Christ’s love as to prove to him that Christianity is superior to Islam and that he should convert.
I called it a kinder, gentler Islamophobia.
My sister was not amused. To her, it was the best kind of evangelism she could practice—attracting flies with honey instead of the vinegar my brother-in-law insisted on employing.
Jonathan Merritt has apparently been reading my sister’s evangelism playbook. In an op-ed in USA Today he outlines the same kind of “love ‘em until they see the error of their ways” philosophy that the religious right should employ toward gays and lesbians.
It is time for evangelical Christians to reform our rhetoric.
This means doing away with clichés such as the infamous “God created Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve.” Self-gratifying monologues are neither helpful nor loving. These slogans make good bumper stickers, but they’re lousy conversation starters. We must begin talking with our gay and lesbian neighbors in meaningful ways.
And it doesn’t end with dialogue. Let us not forget that love is not only a noun, but also a verb. Love is an action. Our assertions that we love our neighbors must be accompanied by visible expressions of that love. Therefore, we need to begin looking for ways to affirm, rather than undermine, our claims to love our gay neighbors.
As Christians, we clearly won’t be able to support any and everything. For example, our biblical convictions prohibit a redefinition of marriage. Yet, there are other areas where we may be able to offer support. We should support protecting our gay and lesbian neighbors from discrimination in the workplace and cleaning up the legal cobwebs that govern hospital visitation rights and inheritance for same-sex couples.
On first blush, this all appears to be fantastic news! Merritt is encouraging the religious right to change its tune about gay and lesbian people—have dialogue with them, stop the mindless “love the sinner, hate the sin” rhetoric that closes the ears, hearts and minds of gays and lesbians. Instead, he urges the religious right to love gays and lesbians—and not just in word, but in deed—in real tangible ways and look for ways to affirm that love. Certainly it would be welcome to have the support of the religious right on important legal matters like job discrimination and hospital visitations.
But, look carefully at what Merritt does NOT want the religious right to change—it’s mind or it’s heart. Instead, like my sister—the insidious goal of this line of “love the sinner, hate the sin” is merely a kinder and gentler form of homophobia. The ultimate goal is to change the homosexual into—a non-homosexual!
Our job is to mirror Christ by loving people in spite of our differences and advocating for our culture’s disenfranchised groups. Only then can we effectively share with them the reasons that we believe our beliefs are most compelling.
We don’t have to compromise our convictions to do this. As Christians, we remain committed to the truth. Failing to speak the truth is both disingenuous and the antithesis of love.
God’s model is a lifelong, monogamous, heterosexual union, but we must balance this message with the scriptural understanding that we are all sinners. Individuals who have decided to follow Christ have not ceased to be sinners; we are simply sinners who have taken advantage of God’s gracious gift of salvation.
The ultimate goal is to prove that “our beliefs are most compelling” and change those gays and lesbians into respectable straights—and barring that, changing them into celibate, religious right brand Christians!
It’s telling to see what rights Merritt urges the religious right to support for gays and lesbians—everything that has nothing to do with gays and lesbians actually having sex. They’ll support our right to a job, our right to visit someone we love in the hospital or inherit money from them—but bless our most precious union—the one that might involve two men or two women getting it on? Forget it. Can’t go there.
In his book Works of Love, Danish theologian Soren Kierkegaard spells out very clearly why this gentler, kinder form of homophobia is just as offensive as the harsher kind:
”There is always the desire, and a worthy desire, too, that the person we are to love may possess endearing perfections; we wish it not only for our own sake but also for the sake of the other person. Above all, it is worthy to wish and pray that the one we love might always behave and be such that we could give our full assent and approval. But in God’s name let us not forget that it is not to our credit if he is such a person, still less to our credit to demand it of him — if there should be any talk about anything being to our credit … then it should be just this, to love with equal faithfulness and tenderness in either case. … he does not love the man he sees and easily makes his love as loathesome to himself as he makes it difficult for the beloved.”
Christians like Merritt cannot love the gay or lesbian person they see—they can only love what they wish that gay or lesbian person to become—not gay. Thanks for pushing the envelope a little bit on your way to Christian love, Jonathan, but honestly, I’d rather you just come right out—like my brother-in-law – and let your homophobia show. But, either way, we understand your ultimate goal—and like vinegar – it stinks.
