What if the right is right about God and gays?
What if he really does side with the Tea Party?
One of the toughest, most awkward aspects of modern American politics is that a significant amount of the public discourse revolves not around public policy, but theology.
Following yesterday’s Supreme Court decisions on gay marriage, social conservatives said pretty much the things you might expect.
Cardinal Timothy Dolan, one of the nation’s top Roman Catholic clerics, argued that the ruling went against “God’s wise design” and called this a “tragic day” for our nation.
Russell Moore with the Southern Baptist Convention argued similarly that the decision wasn’t merely unjust. It violates Christian cosmology.
“God designed the one-flesh union of marriage as an embedded icon of the union between Christ and his church,” Moore wrote.
“Marriage and sexuality, among the most powerful pulls in human existence, are designed to train humanity to recognize, in the fullness of time, what it means for Jesus to be one with his church, as a head with a body.”
Less thoughtful commentators were more blunt. “Supreme Court overrules God,” Fox News commentator Todd Starnes tweeted.
Rep. Michele Bachman, an icon of social conservatives, chided men and women charged with dispensing human justice for violating what she views as sacred law. “The Supreme Court, though they may think so, have not risen to the level of God.”
Former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee dispatched an email arguing that “5 People In Robes Are Not Bigger Than God”and concluding that in response to the decision, “Jesus wept.”
This is difficult territory, not least because many Americans struggle when asked to mingle their thinking about faith and their thinking about social justice issues and politics. It’s awkward, right?
As a result, quotes like these often get tossed out there without discussion or context.
So let me ask some pointed questions. What if these conservative Christians are right? What if the thing that makes Jesus weep isn’t war or hungry children or the death penalty?
What if love and sex between two men or two women is truly the human behavior that inspires a unique level of wrath and opprobrium from the all-powerful deity who created the universe?
What if God’s wrath isn’t triggered by domestic violence, or the rape of female soldiers in our military, or crushing poverty in minority neighborhoods, but by consensual love and willing physical desire?
What if the order of His created universe – a majestic thing that stretches in scope from mega-clusters of galaxies right down to lowly neutrinos — is truly insulted by two men joining in the union of marriage?
What if the blessings of the Creator might actually be withdrawn from the United States of America, not because we murder one-another at an alarming rate or have astonishingly high rates of infant morality, but because two women might raise a child together or avoid paying extra income tax?
I know it sounds like I’m being snarky or sarcastic, but I’m not.
Social conservatives are making a particular claim not just about our politics but about the nature of reality itself – a reality, in their view, created by God with a specific moral architecture.
If they’re right, then it raises a lot of troubling questions about what most of us view as basic goodness. The earth hardly trembles when nations go to war — in fact, these same Christians often beat the drums for conflict.
But the pillars of reality shake when we condone same-sex marriage? Really?
It goes without saying that I don’t have any answers here, but I know many gay people, some of them in long-standing and beautiful marriages.
If Jesus is indeed weeping on their behalf, or worrying about their love eroding the universe’s ‘natural law,’ then I’ll admit to sharing Job’s bafflement at God’s version of justice.
If you look around the world, a huge percentage of our intractable problems are due to orthodox religious beliefs. Sometimes they conflict with other orthodox beliefs, and sometimes with secular beliefs (as in this case). We actually have it pretty easy. Hamas vs the Ultra-Orthodox Jews. Taliban vs secular anybody. Sunni vs Shia Islam
free will…
I think these comments by religious leaders and right-wing commentators are laughable.
God’s design? No one can violate God’s design. It is impossible. If you jump or get pushed off the Empire State building, you will die. That is God’s design.
Now if you want to talk about what people should or shouldn’t do, that is something else. Logically, it’s not a good idea to jump off the Empire State building. You can even say you don’t think people should engage in homosexual sex. But doing so does not violate God’s design – presuming there is a God and one who has any design in particular.
People need to understand there is a difference between what we call human laws and God’s laws.
I don’t think there is anything in God’s laws that would prohibit anyone from drinking beer in a classroom.
When religious believers think that God condemns gays, it is because they think that is what the Bible says. But the references in the Bible are actually few and they are difficult to interpret. Meanwhile, there is a lot else in the Bible that these same people do not follow literally. For an excellent account of these matters, see Walter Wink’s “Homosexuality and the Bible,” available here:
http://forusa.org/content/homosexuality-bible-walter-wink
The Bible is a very complex document, difficult to interpret. There is no religious denomination that actually follows all of it literally.
I have gotten use to the idea that the more right wing you are, the more wrong you are.
I agree with all of the comments, save one: “We actually have it pretty easy.”
As we struggle — and frequently fail — to find ways to care for one another, to respect the rights of others, to educate our children, to conduct free and fair elections, to meet our obligations to the planet, even to pay our bills — the righteous cacophony from the right just does not feel “easy.”
Sigh.
This is one of those no-win political/religious conversations, but religion aside, the marriage issue is a public policy matter with enormous implications.
As a Christian and a member of a Christian tradition that does believe that God designed human beings for a union between a man and a women in marriage I wanted to address some of this.
All sex outside of marriage between a man and a women, under most traditional Christian moral beliefs and backed strongly in Christian scripture is sinful, just as thinking lustful thoughts, not loving our neighbor, lying, being greedy, and so forth are also sinful no better no worse. This is an impossible standard but it is the standard. None of us meet this standard which is why Christ came and why He said I came not to judge the world but to save it, which He has done through His voluntary sacrifice. Homosexuality is certainly discussed as sinful in scripture but not obsessively, however Christ Himself defines marriage and we know that fornication and adultery are sinful.
The world is indeed under judgement and has been since the Fall, allowing gay marriage does not call out this judgement in any sort of special way that our other sins are not already doing in tearing up this planet and creation. The key for me going forward is to not let the waves and trends of modern society to impact the peace and tranquility of our faith. To that regard I just can’t understand getting this upset over gay marriage? We accept divorce for pretty much any reason we accept people living together outside of marriage and so forth, I think the sexual society revolution has already happened why be so agitated over this issue?
To that degree I disagree with how many of my fellow Christians are handling this, many times it is not charitable at all. Many gays will be in heaven, I think they will find out they were wrong this issue when they get there, but come on certainly many gay people are better Christians than myself.
As a practicing Christian, I could not think of a better take on my own thoughts than Mervel’s above. And I would very much like to see the arguments disputing it.
Love it, Mervel.
But the Christian tradition and God’s design must be two different things, right? I mean, how many men and women were getting married in the hundreds of thousands (millions, if you want to go back that far) of years while human beings were roaming around on Earth, reproducing and evolving? Surely they were part of God’s design, if you believe in that. But they weren’t following any Christian traditions.
Brian’s list of “what ifs” points out the hyper hypocrisy of religious conservatives. Even if there were overwhelming evidence condemning gay marriage in the Bible, why is it such an important issue – to the exclusion of almost all the other “sins?” The same group of religious conservatives who like to call themselves “pro-life” support the death penalty, going to war and budgets cuts to social services and health care for the elderly and poor.
Again, going through Brian’s list of other issues, gayness strikes me as the main one that does no harm to other people. No one is unwillingly forced to be gay and I have yet to hear a logical explanation of how someone else’s gay marriage affects the sanctity of my heterosexual marriage or even affects society in general.
But here is the big one. The recent Supreme Court rulings do not force any religion to marry gay couples. It simply said the Federal prohibition against gay marriage rights (DOMA) was unconstitutional and that the plaintiffs in the California case had no standing to sue, therefore leaving the state court ruling that overturned Proposition 8 in place. No church will be forced to marry a gay couple. However, states can permit civil gay marriages and they will not be subject to Federal court scrutiny.
What this boils down to is religious conservatives forget about the separation of church and state in the US. They want to wrongly impose their theology on all Americans. Civil marriages, gay or heterosexual, harm no one and frankly it is none of their business. If you want to live in a theocracy and inflict your “God’s will” on everyone, you are free to join the Taliban, or live in Iran or similar regressive nation. This is America, the land of the free.
Mervel –
Let me acknowledge that I’m about to lark off on a tangent, which for many In Boxers will be uninteresting.
But as a close reader of the Bible for many decades it’s a point that has always troubled me.
Christians have long argued that we live in a vast human era that follows upon the “fall” from grace and that we live, as you write above, in a “world [that is] indeed under judgement and has been since the Fall.”
I get that there is an enormous amount of Christian exegesis and follow-on interpretation that embraces this narrative, but it just doesn’t seem to jive with Genesis or the actual story of the Edenic crisis.
The moral encounter that supposedly produced this “fall” begins, according to the text, with God saying something that was untrue to Adam and Eve.
He tells them that the two magical fruit trees in the garden will kill them if they ate from them.
The “crafty” snake tells Eve that this isn’t true and that instead “when you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.”
It is a peculiar form of “sin” and “temptation” that’s being described here, one which produces not lust or greed or violence or hatred — but self-awareness and moral knowledge.
And it turns out, of course, that the snake is telling the truth. The fruit does exactly what he says it will, producing what most people would describe as a positive influence.
Here’s the ugly product of their sin: “Then the eyes of both were opened.”
When God returns, he is angry at their disobedience, but that is — it seems fairly clearly — not why he kicks them out.
(Why would you, after all, punish an entire species for desiring to have moral judgement?)
According to the text, God kicks Adam and Eve out of the Garden because he is afraid of their potential. Here’s the Vatican’s version of the text:
Then the LORD God said, “See, the man has become like one of us, knowing good and evil; and now, he might reach out his hand and take also from the tree of life, and eat, and live forever”– therefore the LORD God sent him forth from the garden of Eden, to till the ground from which he was taken.
He drove out the man; and at the east of the garden of Eden he placed the cherubim, and a sword flaming and turning to guard the way to the tree of life.
God’s motivation here is understandable, but it’s not a question of man having “fallen.”
On the contrary, it appears to be expressly a question of man having “risen” too far for God’s comfort.
To keep us from reaching the fruit that would make us immortal and therefore truly god-like, he sets a warrior angel to guard the gate with a flaming sword.
That’s pretty unambiguous.
I would point out that this theme is repeated several times in Genesis — the tower of Babel, for example, and the tale of Lot’s wife — where humans are punished not for immorality, but for curiosity or aspiration.
I would argue that this moral cosmology rested more comfortable in the minds of Christians when we as a Western society were more comfortable with castes and obedience and people “knowing their place.”
These days, I think the text is far more ambiguous and troubling to the modern reader.
–Brian, NCPR
“Little by little we human beings are confronted with situations that give us more and more clues that we aren’t perfect.” Fred Rogers
Well Brian, thank god (or God) is all I can say. Immortality would be the ultimate bore.
here’s another version…
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jOxgiq6c6_E
Someone here remarked that every religion has its own interpretation of the bible, accentuating one line of doctrine while suppressing another. All great art and mythology has this characteristic, that of inviting — no, actually in need of — multiple interpretations. I suppose the mythology of the Bible needs this too, although it usually seems that its authors felt a bit more absolute in their intentions. I follow books of philosophy that to me are more consistent in their morality, many of which also use mythology to convey meaning. Mythology can be exciting, beautiful, and can have many engaging nuances. Campbell and others tell us how crucial mythology has been to societies over the millennia.
Joseph Campbell on The Rapture of Being Alive.
Jim: “…the marriage issue is a public policy matter”
May I respectfully add: “bingo”
Well theocrats use this threat – God will withdraw His blessing from the United States – every time some pro-equality advancement is proposed. From divorce to women in the work place to the mythical “War on Christmas” to the legalization of gay sex to the legalization of same-sex marriage. Even in the highly unlikely event that the Right is right, chances are God did it a long time ago.
Or to put it another way: what if same-sex marriage’s legalization is not the cause of the withdrawal of God’s blessing but the result of it.
Some of us prefer to respect what Jesus said about homosexuality: absolutely nothing. That’s my cue. If He didn’t think it was a big enough deal to say one explicit word about it, then I won’t worry about it either.
Actually, if you care to think about it, God doesn’t come off too well in either the Old or New Testament.
Job had his problems with God. So too did Jesus.
For an infinite and eternal, all powerful being, God can seem like a selfish, spoiled, mean spirited child who is always screaming, “Me, me, my way or hell and damnation to you.”
Maybe God’s problem is what Wil Doolittle refers to when he writes, “Immortality would be the ultimate bore.” So maybe God is just bored and wiles away the infinity of his time by picking on humans.
Not endorsing any of what I just wrote. Just saying a person could think those things.
Good point, Pete. If Christians were more like Christ, things would be a lot better. Did you ever notice that in justifying their prejudices, Christian theocrats overwhelmingly quote Biblical passages spoken by pretty much everyone EXCEPT Jesus himself? You’d think that the words of CHRIST would have a more central role in CHRISTianity. But I guess it’s easier to cling to one’s prejudices that to live up to one’s professed prophet.
we all realize that the bible is predominately a hodge podge of smaller cherry-picked texts assembled and re-assembled hundreds of years after Christ walked the earth right?
i’d wager the only actual believable jesus quotes are in the roman transcripts at his “trial”
Brian,
Well I/we view the account in Genesis as the core sin of mankind, pride, believing that we had no need to listen to God, the Christian view of rising as you speak of it here, is not one of self expression and improvement, but one of pride. Humility is the inverse virtue.
This is also what Satan is about, pride seeking to promote oneself to be equal with God. We here Satan today in the post modern slither, its not really true, its all a myth, the bible is a hodge podge, and so forth, he is still among us today with his lies.
I find this account in Genesis quite believable and very relatable to modern life, particularly modern
American life where pride is now a virtue. I don’t find it troubling except to the extent that it shows how little human behavior has changed since the first humans defied God, as I do today in wanting my own way and inserting idols in my life above the worship of God alone.
Two cents; well I don’t realize that at all and neither do many bible scholars and historians. Its really a sideline to get into the whole thing though. But just as an example the New Testament has a relatively solid authorship accounts; many were indeed eye witnesses to the life of Christ and His resurrection, we know where they came from and we know who wrote them and when. Most were written within 10-90 years after the death of Christ. Certainly not in the moment accounts but much like someone writing their account of the Clinton White House years for example today.
But you know it is a sideline and I really don’t want to argue religion.
Mervel brings up humility as a core virtue, and humility is virtue so many ostentatiously religious people seem to lack. None of them knows the mind of God or Jesus.
Mervel: “Many gays will be in heaven, I think they will find out they were wrong this issue when they get there “.
I tend to agree with this.
No one will be included or excluded from eternal life because of what they “do”. My best understanding is that it is based on what we “believe”.
That said, there is a system of reward and punishment.
One can have eternal life and still find themselves short in the area of rewards.
Hey, isn’t withholding a reward a form of “punishment”?
Brian,
Thanks for narrowing the possibilities of what someone can believe to two: If you oppose gay marriage then you must support war, hungry children, and the death penalty. And conversely, everyone who supports gay marriage is out in the streets feeding hungry children and protesting war and the death penalty. You’ve never met a christian opposed to gay marriage, war, and the death penalty; who also was actively involved with charities that helped children in need? If not, then you haven’t gotten around very much. Stop putting people into little boxes. This is what creates segregation and an us vs. them mentality. We are all dynamic creatures loved by God, whether straight or gay. None of use are perfect. None of us are always right, or always wrong.
Also, as to your interpretation of genesis. Now we have the knowledge of good and evil. How would immortality make things any better in our current sphere? This blog post could go on and on for millenia in such a reality. Blog blog blog blog blog……
Here is what has always puzzled me about that story in Genesis: if Eve and Adam did not yet have the “knowledge of good and evil” until they ate the apple, how could they have known it was wrong to eat the apple?
So, instead of reading this as a story of the first moral failing (it couldn’t have been — they did not yet know morality!), I read it as a story of the development of moral awareness. It is true that everything changes once we become aware of our moral responsibility in life.
I can see how you are looking at that Laura.
For me however the story is about the lie that Satan used; “you will certainly not die….you will be like God”.
So it seems that has essentially been our quest as a people for our history, to be like Gods to be our own God, without having to rely on God. But we did die and we are not like God, thus the lie of Satan.
But anyway Genesis is very interesting.
Knucklehead, yes no argument there, humility is relatively rare.
JDM, yes I agree with one important caveat, what you believe if you really do believe it will express itself in how you act at some level. It is relatively costless to intellectually say you believe something, but if you really do hold it as true it will have consequences in how you give yourself up. Christ said to conform our lives to His, well you know things didn’t go that well for Him on the earth, it was not an easy road.
Also I agree there are consequences there is a balance of punishment for how we act, the temporal consequences of sin. If we cheat on our spouse there are consequences for those we love, our children, our spouse and ourselves through guilt and the burden of knowing we treated our family so badly.
In my opinion, the Christian problem in the US is that we have made ourselves and others have portrayed us into some sort of prudish scolds, who also want to tell others what to do; who wants that? That is a very unlikable character. Christianity is not prudish, it is life, peace, freedom and yes fun. If you look at the ancient history of the faith in the broad view you don’t get that sort of person.
So on this issue of gay rights and gay marriage we are only reinforcing this false ideal. I can’t change our teachings on sexual purity but certainly we can change how we act toward other people.
“What if…” Brian asks. From a purely logical point of view the US Constitution itself, which gives us freedom of religion, the freedom to not be Christian or for that matter any religion, the freedom to write our own laws based upon human values, that Constitution itself must be a violation of God’s law if conservatives are correct. It follows then that the US has never had God’s blessing since taking our governance into our own hands back in 1787. It would appear that we have been apostates for the last 226 years. It’s a bit late to say we are going to fall out of God’s favor over a single Supreme Court decision.
First, a note of interest. In Catholic theology, Original Sin is sometimes referred to as The Happy Fault.
Why you might ask? Because without Original Sin, there would be no need for Jesus to save humans.
But here is a problem I have with all or most all religions – Eternal life after death.
The problem I have with it is it sounds more like eternal death than life. Everything I love about life involves death at some point. Life is about growth and change. It’s about the seasons, day and night, new life and the passage of life.
If you take away all the pains of life, aren’t you also taking away all of life’s pleasures?
The world’s religions are very good at describing Hell and why you wouldn’t want to go there. But they are really lousy at selling Heaven as something to desire. The best they can muster up is that in Heaven you will be free from pain and sadness. But think about it. How often are you in pain. How often are you sad. Are pain and sadness such horrible things that you would reject all of the beauty, wonder, joy and pleasure of the life you have in the here and now? And if you do reject this world, this Earth created by God, aren’t you also rejecting God?
Laura brought up a good point about Adam & Eve not having the capacity to know that eating the fruit was wrong until after they did it. A couple of other oddities to the Genesis story is that God is the really bad actor in it. He lied to Adam & Eve when he said they would die by nightfall if they ate the fruit. That clearly was not true. And the serpent told the truth about the fruit and it’s effects. In response to Adam & Eve not believing his lie he condemned them and all their progeny forever to lives of toil and pain. The serpent’s reward for being truthful was to crawl on it’s belly in the dirt forever after.
It’s a myth designed to inspire compliant behavior and nothing more. For those who didn’t take the trouble I’d like to encourage one and all to read Laura’s link above http://forusa.org/content/homosexuality-bible-walter-wink
Well certainly that is one way of looking at things.
I really disagree however. They did die as we all will, the lie of Satan was that we can save ourselves that we indeed are the masters of our own fate our own Gods with no need to glorify or worship our creator, humans have been wrestling with this for all of our existence.
Pete why do you think following Christ means rejecting beauty and happiness? I mean that is the reason I follow Jesus; to live in those very things. Heaven does not need to be “sold”, God forbid, it is our true home.
thank you mr bullard, dead on.
marvel, if it’s true, it’s been credited to jesus that he stated god is in us all, we don’t need to worship in a particular house, we are ourselves housing god inside us. not too far from the snakes point
“..we can save ourselves that we indeed are the masters of our own fate our own Gods ”
as far as rejecting beauty and happiness, consider the Amish’s faceless dolls, plain humble attire, no music.
wouldn’t god want us to sing? shouldn’t his children look at the smiling face of a toy without fearing idolatry? (big contradiction for me there, as I look at crucifixes and jesus’s profile framed on my grandma’s wall)
and all designed to reign-in human behavior to conform to a behavioral standard.
here’s my fav genesis smack:
cain’s offer of grain was poo-poo-ed, while abel’s animal offer was overtly appreciated to the degree that one brother kills the other in anger and jealousy.
what’s the lesson(s) there?
both gave generously of what they produced from god’s grace.
excuse me, *mervel
Mervel, I did not write “following Christ means rejecting beauty and happiness.”
What I was trying to point out is how we come to understand things through opposites.
Pleasure and pain are two sides of the same coin of experience. Good and bad. High and low. Love and hate. Black and white. Night and day. I could go on but I think those should suffice.
There is much beauty and happiness to be seen in the life of Jesus. Sadly, we tend to focus on his crucifixion and death.
Clearly, the authors of the Gospels show little interest in the good times of his life. I’m willing to bet that if we knew about all of his life, there were far more good times than bad times. Isn’t that true for most if not all of us?
“There is much beauty and happiness to be seen in the life of Jesus. Sadly, we tend to focus on his crucifixion and death”
Ha Pete your such a Catholic. You need to hang around with more happy Protestants.
Thank God I’m an atheist!
Ha, well you know most Christians get along pretty well.
But certainly your comment is something which we should think about, we all get so wrapped up in the minutia that we forget how we present to the outside world, we do a bad job of that in the US at least. I think in Africa and Asia we do a much better job of showing the peace and hope of the faith.