On Christianity and Homosexuality

I really wasn’t going to discuss religion on this page, but … a few friends posted on facebook A Teen’s Brave Response to "I’m a ChristianUnless You’re Gay" and as I quietly wiped away the tears this young man’s story inspired, I thought about Kayla and Kylie (not their real names) and felt inspired to write.

Kayla had transferred into my high school, which left her at a social disadvantage for a school where most of our 360 classmates had known each other since fifth grade. Kayla is quiet so while I knew who she was when we graduated, I’m not sure I ever had a real conversation with her in high school. I don’t know when she joined us, but I know she was in my twelfth grade psychology class. I know because over a year later, while attending the same undergraduate, she came out to me. Then she told me a story I hadn’t really remembered. Please keep in mind that this was the mid-1990s, before either Ellen or Rosie had publicly come out of the closet. Mr. M., our psychology teacher, had started our class on whether gay people should be allowed to adopt children by acknowledging that every year this was a difficult subject. Every year, he said, someone would come up to him after class and tell him he was gay, and Mr. M. wanted students to know at the outset that if they needed someone to talk to after this class, he was there. Even while he said this, though, I looked around the classroom and was firmly convinced no one there was gay. Surely, we would know right? I mean, we had been in school together for around seven years, how could we not know something so fundamental about a person? Plus, weren’t gay people supposed to be obviously gay?  Weren’t you supposed to be able to tell they were gay by the clothes they wore or their hairstyles?

Now virtually every person in my hometown would’ve claimed to be some type of a Christian.  We had something like 6 Catholic churches, 2 Methodist churches, a Lutheran, a Seventh Day Adventist, a Presbyterian, and some others thrown in. And those are just the ones I can name off the top of my head. I had been raised in the church and spent most of my high school time – sans a period towards the end when I was an atheist – professing Jesus Christ as Lord and Saviour. Yet, what came out of my friends’ mouths was shocking.  Sure, my parents didn’t like gay people, but they at least tolerated them.  They recognized they were human.  And if they were human, didn’t they have the same right to love and marriage and children and family as the rest of us did?  I mean, I’m not sure both of my parents believed all of this at the time, but they at least recognized the humanness of gay people and I made the rest of the connection on my own.  My classmates did not.  I was alone in my defense of gay parents.  After (or maybe during?), someone said that I must be gay and I remember replying that if I was, there was no way I would’ve been able to defend myself. I would’ve remained silent and alone.  That might not be true – I’m an emotional extrovert and I can’t imagine I wouldn’t have burst into tears during the debate if it had been that personal.  But it wasn’t personal – it was theoretical.  I was, however, concerned that others would also think I was gay and wanted to be clear that I was not.

When I got to university, I joined InterVarsity Christian Fellowship and a sorority.  I think these two things led Kayla to wait a little longer before telling me she is a lesbian. Or maybe she just needed a little more time before she felt she could tell people from her old life. I was only the second person from my high school to know – Mr. M. was the first.  I vaguely remembered the class; she remembered it in detail. I was the only person who didn’t make her feel like a freak.

I wondered then if my classmates would have said things differently if they knew someone in the class was gay. Would they really have been so harsh in their word choice? Would they really have suggested she was a freak?  That someone was inherently wrong with her? That she would be damaging her children? That she could turn her children gay?  I can’t speak for my high school classmates, but I generally think of them, on the whole, as caring and thoughtful individuals.  Sure, there was some bullying (though thankfully not as bad as what I’ve heard of in other schools, nor as bad as Hollywood portrays in their fake high schools), and high school students can be cruel (myself included; apologies to CL for my ill-spoken and unwarranted words), and there were clearly cliques. But, by the time we graduated high school – and definitely all these years later when we’ve reconnected as adults – my high school classmates seemed to really come to care for one another. As a class, we had faced the deaths of friends, the deaths of parents, illnesses, puberty, prom, and obviously all our first heartbreaks. In the end, we actually wanted to see the others succeed and be happy.  So would my caring classmates – the ones who spent two days celebrating our 10 year high school reunion with more honest conversations than we probably had in all our years of schooling; the ones who still send me encouraging emails or fb messages after a bad day on the PhD; the ones who celebrate each other’s births and weddings and engagements and professional successes – would they have reached out to Kayla if they knew they the pain they had caused her?

Kayla deserved better from our class.  She deserved better even from me because while I may have recognized the humanity for theoretical humans, I hadn’t recognized the pain that someone was suffering in front of me. I had never questioned the stereotypes; I had never sought to know the reality.

Kayla was the first friend to come out to me as gay. A few others had declared bisexuality, and later more would do so.  Generally, each declaration was followed with a simple question: “So, do you think it’s a sin?”  I find being an open Christian leads a lot of people to question me about sin – or to confess their own perceived shortcomings. It also leads to a lot of questions about life, God, and religion.  In law school, girls would tell me, “I used to be a good girl like you, but then I met this one guy and fell in love…” or “I used to be a Christian but then…” or “When I was in eighth grade, I stole…”  or “How can you be a Christian and …”

When the Christian Legal Society adopted national requirements that leaders not be gay, it opened a can of worms within the chapter of which I was then President.  The head of Out & Allies asked me what I was going to do about it.  The chapter decided – after a contentious debate – that we wouldn’t adopt the national guidelines and we would turn in our credentials. When I stepped down as President, though, the new Presidents negotiated our membership with reworded bylaws. It would still exclude gay people from leadership but would also list other sins that were equally bad, like pride and heterosexual sex outside of marriage.  But having been in Christian leadership for over six years by then, I knew I would never be asked about my own sexual purity; I would never be asked to step down because I was too prideful or too arrogant or too … well, anything, really, because I wasn’t gay and I was a Christian. Our Vice President at the time was engaged and no one had once questioned her about her sex life. I dated a high number of men in my 3 years of law school and I was never asked about my sex life.  But if I had been gay, the mere “lusting in my heart” for another woman would have likely disqualified me; I most certainly would have been subjected to routine questioning to ensure I was “pure” enough to be a leader. So I left CLS.  I couldn’t talk about the love of Jesus for every human being while being a part of an organization that automatically created a second-class citizenry.  I retained my Allied status in Out & Allies and today remain proud of the way my life is reflected in my law school accomplishments: member of journals; former President of CLS; Ally; and, yes, my name even hangs on a plaque in a bar across the street from our law school.

I have not always handled my friend’s comings out well.  When a guy I had once dated told me many years later that he had a confession, I expected to hear he had never gotten over me. Instead, he told me was gay. I was initially less than gracious. I had mourned the end of this relationship for years, not understanding what had gone wrong, and his being gay made me feel that the chemistry I had felt was a lie. It also made me angry that he hadn’t told me sooner, thereby explaining what had always felt unexplainable. When I realized I had acted badly, I tried to rectify it, but even then it just ended in my lecturing him about how I didn’t find sexuality something he needed to ‘confess’ to people. After all, I don’t go around ‘confessing’ that I’m a girl or white or anything else that I consider just an intrinsic part of who I am.  Yeah, super gracious. 

I don’t remember exactly what I said to Kylie, a friend who came out to me more than a decade after Kayla did.  I assume I said the same thing I have most of the other times: Thanks for being willing to share that with me. With over a decade of experience, I have found that to be the most honest and most necessary thing to say. I do remember, however, a conversation that came later. A drunk Kylie told me she wished she wasn’t gay.  Perhaps, she said, she really was broken.  And if she wasn’t gay, then she could be honest about who she was with her conservative family. Such sentiments had been repeated to me often over the years.  And then she asked it:  Is it a sin? Do you think I’m sinning? Here’s my answer for Kylie, and for the others who have asked as much to me:

Honestly, I don’t know. But more pertinently: I don’t care.

It’s important for Christians to understand what Kylie was really asking:  Do you think God loves me as I am or do I need to try to be something I inherently don’t think I am or am capable of becoming just to gain His acceptance?  And on this point Christianity is unequivocal: we are all broken somehow, and regardless of where that brokenness comes from or how it manifests itself, God loves us, and in the words of “Bridget Jones,” He loves us just as we are. Unconditional love. Acceptance. Forgiveness for what’s wrong; pride for what’s right. He loves us.

I have heard Biblical scholars who suggest that homosexuality is a sin and Biblical scholars who state that it is not under the new Covenant of Christ. I have had gay friends who are Christians and believe they are sinners and those who think they are not. It is an area I don’t think about very much because I’m not gay. Christ didn’t tell me to worry about whether other people were sinning. He told me to worry about my own sin.  Only when I’ve taken care of my own sins am I to worry about encouraging others not to sin. 

I have a lot of sin in my own life. I’m prideful and arrogant fairly often. I’m envious pretty much daily. I gossip when I should remain silent. I let fear control my responses to too many things. I am gluttonous. I lie, sometimes even to myself, and manipulate people, sometimes including myself. I withhold forgiveness over stupid things. At times, I’m lazy and procrastinate away God’s plans for me. I speak without thinking, and in doing so cause pain. And I reject God’s path regularly as I try to control things I have no control over, reject his call for me to do things I don’t want to do, and too often turn away when I feel He isn’t giving me what I think I deserve.

Quite simply, I am Jonah. 

Jonah, who was asked by God to tell the Ninevites to stop sinning. Jonah who told God he didn’t want to because he hated the Ninevites and he didn’t want them to repent. He wanted God to punish them. Jonah who ran away from God, boarded a boat and thought he could escape God’s calling by crossing the sea. And when Jonah ran from God, he really ran from God. He wasn’t just going from Israel to Turkey. Nineveh is now known as Mosul, Iraq, and Jonah boarded a ship to cross the Mediterranean, meaning the exact opposite direction. When God told Jonah to come back, and then started a storm that resulted in Jonah being tossed into the sea, Jonah was so freaking stubborn that he actually sat inside the belly of a big fish for three days because he didn’t want to do what God wanted him to do. He was hateful and selfish and arrogant and thought he could outlast God.  He was hoping God would blink first.  Talk about stubborn!  And that is me. 

I even talk to God like Jonah talks to God. When Jonah didn’t get his way – because he told the Ninevites to repent and they did, so God didn’t unleash his fury on them – Jonah threw a hissy fit. He actually told God he tried to forestall His grace for the Ninevites and he’d rather die than live after helping them. He sat in the dessert pouting like a child. When God tried to help Jonah understand his grace by using a tree, Jonah just became angrier, telling God he was “so angry I wish I was dead.”  I’m similar in my brutal honesty with God, telling him the other day – in worship! – that I hate the fact that English worship songs use music I’m not familiar with.  Then I realized I had said I hated something about worship and apologized. A few minutes later I was making a joke in prayer because God gave me a worship song where I knew the music but the lyrics were all changed, with the English church singing about how “My King rides a donkey.”  I couldn’t help but joke with the One who brought me all that.

Whether you take the Bible as literal or as part literal, part figurative, or as all fully man-made, you have to admit that it’s not a good sign of your religiousness when the character you relate to the most is Jonah.  Not Elizabeth or Ruth or Mary or the other Mary.  Jonah.  Because I’m pain-in-the-a$$ stubborn.

So I concentrate more on what the Bible says about pride, envy, and forgiveness than I do about homosexuality. I have too much on my own sinful plate to spend time worrying about whether something else I’m not engaged in constitutes sinfulness.  Too many planks in my own eye to be thinking about whether I see a splinter in someone else’s.

And Jesus loves me anyhow. This is something I believe with my whole heart.  And if I believe that with my whole heart – if I believe that in my most selfish, stubborn, unrepentant moments, Jesus loves me – how in the world can I consider myself well placed to hand out judgment to others? How can I possibly know what separates them from a relationship with God when nothing I do separates Him from me? And if I believe God loves each and every person He creates in his image – and I fervently do – than how in the world can I do or say anything less than loving to them?  If God wants a relationship with them – and I believe He does – how can I tell them He would reject who they are? How can I make them feel they are anything less than a reflection of God’s divinity and wondrous hand?