Reba McEntire and the Evangelical Lutheran Church of America this week became the two latest examples of moderate to conservative notables who uphold a grace-based policy of non-judgment toward gay and lesbian couples.
The ELCA recognized that gay Christians are a part of the Lutheran family, and voted to allow gay and lesbian clergy in committed same-sex relationships to serve as ministers.
Meanwhile, McEntire said her own stance is based upon the Bible:
I just try not to judge. Don’t judge me, and I won’t judge you. And that’s what it says in the Bible — ‘Don’t judge.’
Regarding gay marriage, McEntire advised Christians:
“Keep an open mind. That would be my voice. I have gay friends. I have a lot of straight friends. I don’t judge them. I take them for what they are. They’re my friends, and I can’t defend my feelings for them, other than I like ‘em,” said McEntire. “I have gay friends who have partners, and I see where they would want to get married. I understand why. So, I can’t judge that.”
Unfortunately, Exodus International never received the memo that Christians are supposed to extend grace toward others and be humble about their own moral shortcomings.
Ignoring any actual Bible passages, Exodus vaguely “says this is a clear move away from biblical teaching on sexuality and a disconcerting approach to this issue.” Exodus did not cite any passages to substantiate its position. Instead, Exodus activist Jeff Buchanan — whose job is to politicize churches and turn them against same-sex-attracted people of faith — said “God’ timeless design for human sexuality was intended for one man and one woman. No church denomination can abandon this indispensable biblical truth without diminishing the global Christian church and causing greater confusion for those already conflicted by their sexuality.”
Buchanan demonstrates no knowledge of true history — or experience in “biblical truth.” His notion of human sexuality and gender equality in marriage is a product not of the Bible — which condones polygamy and wife-killing — but of the industrial and sexual revolutions. Far from upholding the Bible, Buchanan and his organization teach the utterly un-biblical notion that predominant lifelong homosexual attraction is caused by lousy parents or abuse. Some Exodus member “ministers” and Focus activists teach the equally un-biblical notion that predominant homosexual attraction can be extinguished through lessons for men in how to act macho, lessons for women in how to become more appealing to conservative men, rigid control of one’s thoughts, intolerance and discrimination toward sexually honest persons, and marriage to unsuspecting and misled heterosexual spouses.
Not to be outdone by his official statement for Exodus, Buchanan sneered on his Twitter account: “Luthe[r]ans vote to allow gay clergy. Sad day for the Body of Christ.”
Oh really, Jeff? It’s a sad day when gay Christians are welcomed and treated with respect? It’s a happy day, I guess, when heterosexuals and “ex-gays” use churches to ostracize others and promote satisfaction in their own vices?
Buchanan added a quote from Rick Warren: “When morality is determined by popularity, depravity becomes normality and the death of that culture becomes an inevitability.”
Buchanan and Warren may be partly right: Exodus seeks to define constitutional law, morality, and marriage according to the votes of social conservatives, not on the basis of true humanitarian values. Depravity and death have become idols for social conservatives in town-hall meetings in recent weeks; if Buchanan and Warren are right, then the death of their own movement lies ahead.
Until the collapse of the Christian right happens, however, Exodus’ promotion of dishonesty and intolerance will continue to breed an epidemic of fraudulent ex-gay marriages that end in divorce for heterosexual spouses and children — and disillusionment for churches that performed marriages based upon Exodus’ false promises of “change.”
Even as Exodus president Alan Chambers writes books that promote sexless, romanceless “ex-gay” marriage and condemn gay celibacy, Christian churches — Lutherans in particular — are learning from experience that Exodus does not promote a healthy, modest spiritual perspective on human sexuality. Churches are beginning to realize that Exodus idolizes heterosexual sex to an extreme, rejects honesty, affirms identity politics, and ostracizes and condemns those whom Chambers patronizingly calls “prodigals”: People whom Exodus wants excluded from social and religious communities for refusing to adhere to Exodus’ political orthodoxy and faux fundamentalism.
Exodus activist Nate Oyloe exemplified this culture of dishonesty and identity politics in a presentation to the ELCA:
In my life, [Oyloe said,] homosexuality didn’t just encompass my attractions, it defined my identity. As a Christian seeking to live by and be defined by the truth of Scripture first, I concluded that I could not pursue both. I am saddened that as a result of the ELCA’ decision, others will find it harder to obtain the biblical answers and compassionate support that helped me to experience life-giving freedom.
Oyloe remains predominantly same-sex-attracted, but misled the ELCA about this. He is a prisoner of suppressed feelings, fear of sexuality, and Exodus’ political and theological conformity. In fact, he describes himself as consumed by ex-gay identity politics. His effort to suppress gay Lutherans and their own spiritual and personal freedoms suggest that Oyloe does not really experience or affirm freedom at all.
Oyloe’s ex-gay “identity” — as defined by Exodus — precludes grace, charity, repentance, and humility. Like other Exodus activists, Oyloe affirms discrimination, sexual dishonesty, and ignorance of the Bible through the use of godtalk: Words such as “Christian,” “truth”, and “Scripture” that are sprinkled throughout one’s speech but left unsubstantiated and disconnected from reality, fact, and the Bible. Oyloe projects his own preoccupation with “identity” onto gay Lutherans in an elaborate blame game — and then criticizes the ELCA for offering Lutherans an alternative to his identity politics.
Having rejected both monogamy and gay celibacy as options for gay Christians, Exodus leadership wants gay Lutherans to be forced into a nightmarish choice: Enter a masquerade of sexless ex-gay marriage, or leave their church. The ELCA has wisely rejected this false choice.
The ELCA vote does not, unfortunately, make it any harder for Lutherans to pursue denial and self-delusion through ex-gay programs, should any choose to do so. The vote simply reduces the discriminatory pressure upon same-sex-attracted and faithful Lutherans to lie and marry an unsuspecting heterosexual in order to achieve respect and leadership in the church.
This is just appalling. If Luther, the late German Christian protester, would still be here…where the denomination “Lutherans” derived from, he would be stunned and completely disappointed in this horrible abomination to the Word of God and the Gospel. I totally am against this election. When God created “man” he created Adam and Eve, NOT Adam and STEVE!!! Hello people. This is a direct form of disobedience to God. And this is happening in a Church, a denomination that professes to know the Word of God???? Please, God will have to deal with you guys…and it won’t be pretty.
Jasonbradyut, Luther would be appalled at your phony claim to know the word of God, and your effort to replace Christianity with your own self-serving identity politics.
If God didn’t create Steve, then he didn’t create you either, Jason.
“When God created “man’ he created Adam and Eve, NOT Adam and STEVE!!!”
Yes, of course. The story of Adam and Eve is a story about how the human race began. (Probably few educated people nowadays would regard it as literal history, but it makes no difference, for present purposes, even if you do.)
Naturally it wouldn’t begin with Adam and Steve (or with Alice and Eve), since a gay (or lesbian) relationship wouldn’t contribute to populating the world. Even if the first human couple had procreated by artificial insemination, both a male and a female would have been needed to produce the necessary sperm and ovum. But the inference from this that ALL subsequent members of the human race are intended to be heterosexual is a non sequitur; it is simply an assumption which the facts do not require us to make, and which the way that the world has turned out plainly contradicts.
The human race began sometime long before Mitochondrial Eve and Y-chromosomal Adam, who were likely two individuals each living among other people — in different periods in history.
If God played a role, it was perhaps in the evolution of the Homo genus from Australopithecine ancestors 2.5 million years ago.
Jason failed to cite the Bible’s account of this creation — and God’s presumed role in the extinction of our close genetic siblings Homo neanderthalensis, who died out 24,000 years ago, and Homo floresiensis, who may have lived and died out 12,000 years ago. This failure is, perhaps, because the Bible simply does not record most of human history.
The Bible says little about our literal creation, and Jason’s claim to the contrary is just another deception by an insecure person who exploits fragments of the Bible in order to make himself appear holier and more self-confident than, sadly, he is.
Jason did succeed in distracting attention from the topic of this page, which is Exodus’ effort to poison the Lutheran church with doomed ex-gay marriages.
Well, I think both sides are skipping around the issue here; that is, the bible (in typical self-contradictory fashion) supports both sides of this argument. There’s no question that there are strong anti-gay admonitions in both the old and new testaments; likewise there are strong “judge not” passages throughout.
This exemplifies the root problem with religious belief based on “sacred” texts. All varieties, be they barbaric (fundamentalists a la Exodus) or civilized (progressives a la the Lutherans) are obliged to practice bible buffet in order to maintain any sort of consistency within their belief system. And neither side will ever, nor is it even possible to, change the other’s mind because the bible will always say exactly what BOTH sides want it to say.
Gary, I wasn’t intentionally skipping around the issue, but rather hoping people might eventually draw the same conclusion that you do. I suppose that’s the same thing.
Exodus promotes a form of relativism which claims that social conservatives’ distortions of the Bible are at least as valid as anyone else’s. The only true “moral absolute” that Exodus believes is “We’re right and you’re not” — regardless of what any holy book says.
Jason’s comment is straight out of the Peter LaBarbera school of lunacy; here in London, there’s always 20 or so placard waving crackpots saying similar things at gay pride celebrations. The first question to such people is how they know of any purposeful creation in the first place.
Secondly, it’s equally amusing to ask how old do they think the earth is? I always enjoy ridiculing such protesters with this line of conversation. To say that the planet is 6,000 years old, is like saying the distance from San Francisco to New York is about 20 feet (Liberty “University” proudly displays a dinosaur fossil which it claims, is ‘about a few thousand years old’).
Jason, with his fundamentalism, ridiculous though it may be, has less of a problem explaining what God was doing over the past 4.5 billion years, and more specifically, in the last 200,000 years of humanity.
Just imagine what life must have been like for early humans: life expectancy 20-25 years, terrified by earthquakes, storms, floods; hunted by predators, fighting for shelter, food, women; nearly going extinct due to ice ages and supervolcanoes; dying of diseases we had barely developed immunity to…. and while all this suffering was going on, for 196,000 years, God watched, ambivalent, with folded arms. Then after all this time, God decides to intervene by sending a messenger, rather than to civilized cultures like the Chinese or Greeks, to some peasants in Palestine, from where the message would take so long to get out, at least two-thirds of the world’s population are yet to hear it.
Jason wonders what it may be like if Luther were still here. Well, Luther was open minded, a radical for his time. But if he had lived on while great thinkers progressed the sum total of human knowledge (such as Galileo Galilei,Isaac Newton, Francis Bacon, David Hume, Thomas Paine, Louis Pasteur, Charles Darwin, Gregor Mendel, Marie Curie, Edwin Hubble, James Watson, Francis Crick, Richard Dawkins, to name but a few) – who knows what he might be thinking? We simply have much better explanations, than those simple, primitive first attempts which were written by simple people, who knew no biology, no meteorology, no astronomy, no psychology.
Actually, we can take some inspiration from the Bible – the parable of the talents. Luther, like the various authors of the books of ‘Moses’, had an excuse. People like Jason, who ignores all the accumulated knowledge at his fungertips in favour of a 15th century preacher, do not. Frankly, it’s time he got out of the kneeling position, started thinking and looked at the real world around him.
It’s hilarious that Jason thinks Luther was a theocrat bent on preserving the orthodoxy of his times.
Michael, thanks for mentioning Mitochondrial Eve and Eurasian Adam…I got two kits from the Genographic Project and swabbed to find the deep ancestry of both my parents. It was exciting! I am Cro Magnon on my dad’s side, and my mom’s side, though from Ireland recently, settled mainly in Russia and Sweden after migrating north from the Middle East long, long ago. Finding out the basic scientific information about human origins is far more interesting and exciting than believing superstitious nonsense about Adam and Eve and silliness about the earth being created in six days a few thousand years ago. When religionists scream their myths at me I give them a big raspberry and tell them to read some science and take a laxative. The anti-gay crowd is ticked off by science because it reveals truth where their myths only lead to more myths.
Adrian,
with some supposition, life life expentancy at birth for early humanoids might have been 20-40. However, life expectancy at adolescence would have been a good deal higher. Let’s say even as high as 50-60? Sometimes, I wish that religionists would at least say something like “Okay, we believe in the Bible and that the earth is 6000 years old but God is so omnipotent that he created it to LOOK like it is 4.5billion years old. No contradiction here folks…. time to go back to your pews”
Homosexuality is the incredibly handy shibboleth by which some religionists can prescribe and proscribe the boundaries of doctrine and faith for the unthinking type of fellow traveller. The Bible has much more to say about adultery than homosexuality. Where then is the DOMA sub-clause banning divorce? The Lutherans have sensibly decided against a form of irrational idolatry (Bible literalism) as opposed to genuine faith & worship.
I believe that people can credibly believe that the Bible contains some material truths, meaningful parables, valuable spiritual beliefs, and moral lessons worth following.
But Exodus leaders do not believe much of that. They dishonestly claim to believe all of the Bible to be factually true — even as they reject half or more of the Bible’s contents as irrelevant to their own lives. They scramble the remainder of the Bible to suit whatever momentary agenda they may have. And they practice relativism while dishonestly claiming to believe absolutes.
Exodus leaders and activists treat the Bible as a child might treat a Rubik’s Cube — removing half the puzzle pieces, then arranging the remainder to look pretty. And of course, they reject every other puzzle as unholy and untouchable.
The Lutherans, at least, make a good-faith effort to recognize the Bible’s mixed messages regarding sexual ethics and marriage, and to discern spiritual truth from logic and from positive values such as compassion, justice, and love of one’s neighbors. This respect for logic and for these basic values are absent from the ego-driven agenda-setters of Exodus.
Talking of which, there’s no evidence for any Exodus either… just imagine, a whole organization, based on fantasy!
Paul – that is still no consolation to the many young who cannot get to adolescence in the first place!
[...] in member families that include someone in a longterm same-sex relationship. Buchanan frequently boasted that the Bible is on his side while exposing both an ignorance of Biblical morality and a lack of [...]