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Is the Gay Couple at Your Church Having Sex? It’s None of Your Business.

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A few months ago, one of our readers forwarded us a link to a short Ancient Faith Radio podcast where Frederica Mathewes-Green, a writer and speaker within the Orthodox Christian tradition, offers her thoughts on pastors and same-sex attraction. It was recorded in 2012, and we haven’t gotten the links to the mp3 and podcast download to work properly. If you’re interested in listening to it before reading the rest of this post, it’s best to click the “play” button on the page itself after you’ve followed our link. Though this podcast isn’t new and isn’t nearly long enough for a full resource review, we wanted to share some of our thoughts on its content and welcome our readers to share their own thoughts in the comments.

We’ll say up front that if you hold a progressive sexual ethic, you will likely disagree with a significant part of this podcast’s content. If you hold some form of traditional sexual ethic, you will likely find yourself agreeing with at least some parts of what Mathewes-Green has to say, but may also find yourself challenged. Regardless, today’s post should not be taken as a blanket endorsement of everything Mathewes-Green has said publicly about LGBT issues.

In this talk, Mathewes-Green offers her opinion on the question, “What is the proper response if I find myself at an Orthodox parish where two people who seem to be a gay couple are accepted, and are even receiving communion?” Part if her response is that what fellow parishioners are or aren’t doing in their private lives “Is really none of your business.” She states that matters such as whether a person is engaging in sexual activity with a same-sex partner should be left between that individual and his or her confessor. She also says that it is appropriate for a parishioner to ask a priest where he stands on sexual ethics issues generally, and to use that information in the process of determining whether to remain at that parish or to continue seeing that priest for confession and other pastoral care needs.

No matter what kind of sexual ethic a person holds, there’s something to learn from this podcast. Prying into the lives of others is not Christian. Accusing another person of wrongdoing on vague suspicion is not how Christ calls us to treat our brothers and sisters. Making assumptions about what someone else is or is not working on in spiritual direction is destructive for both the person making the assumptions and the person on the receiving end. Everyone’s privacy should be respected. These statements apply across the board when it comes to questions of whether someone is committing sin.

One aspect of this podcast that we liked was Mathewes-Green’s reminder that no one can know fully what is happening in another person’s life unless that person shares it, and that person has no obligation to do so when met with rude demands by a fellow parishioner. A common stereotype of conservative churches is that devout members of these communities are obsessed with the sex lives of others. There’s a bit of truth in many stereotypes, and the two of us have experienced more than our share of mistreatment within both our former and current traditions because of assumptions other Christians have made about us. As we’ve written before, our celibacy does little to protect us from hurtful rumors and vindictive actions. But there’s no reason that straight people with traditional sexual ethics have to behave in this way toward LGBT (or suspected LGBT) members of their congregations. Fairly often, we hear it suggested that only in liberal congregations will members take a “none of my business” approach to other people’s private matters. Yet that appears to be Mathewes-Green’s approach, and if you’ve listened to even one minute of the podcast, it should be abundantly clear that she is no liberal.

The other bit we found helpful was Mathewes-Green’s emphasis on the pastor’s role in providing spiritual direction. When we leave questions like, “Who is permitted to commune?” and “Is so-and-so living in a way that’s informed by our Christian tradition?” as private discussions between a parishioner and the pastor, we trust that pastor and God to help all members of the parish sort out complicated issues in the best way possible. We develop even greater trust in our church leaders by making inquiries about where they stand on controversial matters and leaving it to them to apply Christian teaching in individual circumstances. The two of us have found much comfort in knowing that we can ask our own priests questions about where they stand on theological, liturgical, and practical matters. We’ve grown a lot in our own spiritual lives as a result. We’re also grateful that we and others have the freedom to decide who will serve as our spiritual fathers. It seems to us that trusting pastors to do their jobs and seeking guidance elsewhere if we have doubts is healthier than declaring ourselves parish inquisitors and obsessing over why someone isn’t fasting with the rest of us, why a family hasn’t been at church in two months even though we’ve seen them at a baseball game, or why a child doesn’t realize that stomping an anthill in the parish courtyard is poor care for God’s creation. Trusting those charged with providing spiritual guidance to all these folks is not the same as saying, “Anything goes. Let’s all be relativists!”

We wonder, how would conservative Christian traditions respond differently to LGBT members of their faith communities if more people took Mathewes-Green’s approach to the presence of same-sex couples? Would such a shift create space for churches to be more welcoming while not compromising their convictions? How might LGBT members of conservative churches react differently?

Comment Policy: Please remember that we, and all others commenting on this blog, are people. Practice kindness. Practice generosity. Practice asking questions. Practice showing love. Practice being human. If your comment is rude, it will be deleted. If you are constantly negative, argumentative, or bullish, you will not be able to comment anymore. We are the sole moderators of the combox.

Celibacy, Choice, and Obedience: In Defense of the “Forced”

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A reflection by Sarah

We’ve shifted to a Monday, Wednesday, Friday, plus Saturday Symposium posting schedule, so I feel a bit odd writing an additional post for today. But the writing bug bit me, and I figured I could take a quick break from working on my dissertation and the response we’re currently writing to Maria McDowell’s recent piece at the WIT blog (that will be coming out on Monday, in case anyone was wondering. We’ve received a ton of email about it).

Over the past few weeks, gay celibates have been receiving quite a bit of media attention. It began with this article at Slate by Vanessa Vitiello Urquhart. Then more recently, Sarah Pulliam Bailey at Religion News Service wrote another article on gay celibacy featuring Julie Rodgers, and Eliel Cruz at The Advocate published an op-ed defending the place of celibate gay Christians in both the Church and the LGBTQ community. Several responses have been written already. Eve Tushnet, a celibate gay Catholic, published this article yesterday, arguing that celibacy (as understood solely in terms of “sexual abstinence”) is not really the point: vocation is. Francis DeBernardo wrote a post on New Ways Ministry’s blog suggesting that celibacy is becoming the new reparative therapy for LGBTQ Christians, and that it is harmful to those who don’t feel a sense of call to celibate vocations. Then, Stephen Long at Sacred Tension published a post today reflecting on Cruz’s piece and stating, “I do believe that it should be a private choice and that neither the church nor the gay community should pressure them. But, as long as the church believes that gay sex is universally sinful, I honestly wonder if that will ever fully be a reality.”

As I’ve read each of these and the comment responses they’ve received, I’ve seen a troubling implication arising over and over again — that there are two types of celibate gay people: those who choose celibacy because they feel called, and those who are forced into celibacy by their faith traditions. I’ve never been good at following the first rule of the internet (“Don’t read the comments!”), so over the past few days I’ve been devouring the comments sections on the three news articles and responses. I’ve seen hundreds of statements such as, “I don’t mind celibate gays as long as they don’t try to force me to be celibate,” and “There’s nothing wrong with gay people who feel called to celibacy. It’s a spiritual gift for some people. But gay people who are celibate just because their church says they have to be are oppressed and delusional.” These comments show a grave misunderstanding of the commitments that some LGBTQ Christians make to celibacy. They fail to consider that regardless of the reason for choosing celibacy, many LGBTQ celibates are — like Eve Tushnet says in her article linked above — more concerned about developing a meaningful, Christlike way of life than with simply abstaining from sex or telling other people they shouldn’t be having sex.

As Lindsey and I have stated repeatedly on this blog, our choice to live celibacy comes from the deep sense of call. We are, like Francis DeBernardo says, the sort of LGBTQ people whose “celibacy is a calling, a response, and a choice.  For them, it is a joy.” We are the category of people Stephen Long says he isn’t talking about in his response to the Cruz piece. It would be all too easy (not to mention prideful) for us to pat ourselves on the back and say, “People are recognizing that some LGBTQ Christians feel called to celibacy. Maybe we’ve had a small role in helping folks to see this.” But that’s not what we’re doing today. Instead, we grieve the false dichotomy that this discussion has furthered.

One of our primary purposes on this blog has been to discuss celibacy as a vocation, and that discussion falls shamefully short when limited to celibates whose stories are like Lindsey’s and mine. We wrote recently that celibacy as a vocation can be meaningful regardless of the celibate person’s level of choice. For a person who is truly interested in making a lifelong commitment to celibacy, whatever the reason, that way of life has to be meaningful in order for it to be sustainable. Lindsey and I did not come to celibacy in the same way as many of our celibate LGBTQ brothers and sisters, but all of us deal with the common struggle of living, as best we can, as imitations of Christ. And we see that as far more important than the question of why a person chose celibacy in the first place.

We use the word “choice” very often in our own writings. We also hear it from others, and it has become a sort of buzzword within the past week. But it seems to us that “choice” does not have the same meaning every time it’s included in an internet comment. Most of the commenters I’ve read this week have implied that celibacy can only be good and valuable when, to borrow Aaron Taylor’s analogy, it’s just another option in a well-stocked grocery store. There’s a common assumption that in order for a choice to be a choice in the truest sense, there must be at least one other available alternative. Most folks who advocate for celibacy being a “choice” rather than a “mandate” are actually saying that celibacy can’t be a choice unless gay marriage is also an available choice within every Christian tradition. They see no possibility that an LGBTQ person could choose celibacy freely as a response to his/her Christian tradition’s more conservative theologies of marriage and sexuality. But people like Eve Tushnet and many of the folks at Spiritual Friendship often counter this assertion when they discuss celibacy as a choice to obey the teachings of their churches.

When I think of the word “choice,” I cannot separate it from the word, “obedience.” All the choices I make every day, no matter what they are, have some connection to my obedience to Christ. For a Christian, no choice can occur in a vacuum. Some of my choices seem freer than others. Whether they actually are or not is up for philosophical and theological debate. Perhaps material for another post.

Back to the topic at hand, I make choices all the time that are for my own good rather than because I necessarily want to select a certain option. Due to a recent diagnosis of Meniere’s disease, I’ve had to shift my diet entirely to very low sodium foods. If you know me in real life and are aware of how much I enjoy sushi, Thai food, and other high sodium cuisines, you probably have a sense of how much I resent that choice. But I made it anyway because I wanted to do everything possible to prevent further permanent hearing loss and minimize my number of missed work days due to vertigo. I chose to obey my doctor because he knows better than I do what will minimize this condition’s damage to my hearing and balance. Some might be thinking, “But you didn’t have a choice. You were forced into that choice because of your medical condition.” Actually, that’s not true. I could be choosing to eat California rolls with extra soy sauce every day. Some days, I do make that choice. And I pay for it with my health, because all choices have consequences. In this situation, the best choice is not the choice I like. It’s a choice that limits how I get to experience certain aspects of life. Some days, it even makes me depressed. It’s a choice I made because there was no other healthy alternative. But it was still my choice. There was a point at which I finally felt ready to say to my doctor, “You’ve told me this is what I have to do in order to be healthy. I don’t understand it, I don’t like it, I’d rather be making a different decision, but I’ll trust you on this one.” However, I hope that someday, I will be able to say that I’ve found a sustainable way of life as a person with Meniere’s disease. It’s because of experiences like this one that I can see why a person might choose celibacy out of a sense of obedience, but still see celibacy in vocational terms.

Obedience is a gift freely given. True obedience comes from a desire to do what is being asked of you, even if you don’t have a full understanding of why it’s necessary or why other possible options would be worse for you in the long run . It does not come from being beaten into submission. If you’ve ever watched a child for an afternoon, you know that it’s impossible to make a child obey if she is absolutely intent on being disobedient. If you’re a good caregiver, you’ll be firm without resorting to abusive tactics to get the child to do what you’re asking of her for her own good. In many cases, the child will eventually come around and choose to obey. But if you’re abusive, she will probably come to resent you. If she does what you ask her to at all in this case, it’s likely coming from survival instinct rather than true obedience. When I hear people talking about forced celibacy, I have to wonder whether they’re speaking strictly of churches that abuse and bully their LGBTQ children into submission, churches that ask all their children to practice a conservative sexual ethic, or both. Most of the time, I think people conflate the two. I get this impression every time I hear someone suggest that people like Eve Tushnet, Ron Belgau, and Wesley Hill have been “forced” into celibacy and are delusional. Have they chosen celibacy in obedience to the teachings of their Christian traditions? Absolutely. But is this the same as being sexually abstinent because of fear that abuse will come your way otherwise? I don’t think so at all.

I think we need to change the direction of the recent conversation on “chosen” versus “forced” celibacy and “gay celibates who feel called” versus “gay celibates who are celibate because they have to be.” The truth is, we’re all the same in that we’re living every day, making choices, and trying our hardest with God’s help to be Christlike. Lindsey and I would never advocate shaming, beating, manipulating, harassing, or bullying anyone into celibacy. Neither would any of the other LGBTQ celibates we know personally, yet they’re accused of such regularly just because they chose celibacy from a place of obedience rather than a place of, “This is my personal calling from God.” I think the number of people who are actually forced into celibacy through abusive means and stick with it is very, very low. But the number of people who have experienced these sorts of abuses and have eventually chosen non-celibacy is very, very high. Perhaps that’s what leads so many to slap the label of “forced celibacy” onto celibates who don’t feel a “call” to it, but chose to pursue it as part of their Christian vocation because that’s what their churches ask them to do. I hope that future discussions about this topic will involve more kindness, compassion, and questioning. Attempting to judge who chose celibacy for the “right” reasons and who chose it for the “wrong” reasons benefits no one.

Comment Policy: Please remember that we, and all others commenting on this blog, are people. Practice kindness. Practice generosity. Practice asking questions. Practice showing love. Practice being human. If your comment is rude, it will be deleted. If you are constantly negative, argumentative, or bullish, you will not be able to comment anymore. We are the sole moderators of the combox.

The Idolatry of People-Pleasing

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It’s no secret that LGBT people in the Church frequently deal with criticism. We’ve spoken to how it can be challenging for LGBT Christians to find a church home, ways that people draw lines to separate the “good” gays from the “bad” gays, how LGBT people are expected to conform perfectly to standards of morality, and how some churches can regard the mere presence of an identifiable LGBT person as a distinct threat. The question is not whether the criticism will come, but is instead how we will deal with that criticism that will inevitably arise. Sometimes, responding directly to others’ opinions and critiques is necessary and helpful. Meaningful conversation would not be possible without some level of disagreement; no one experiences intellectual growth as a result of interacting only with people who share one’s worldview in totality. But at other times we wonder if the urge to respond to real or perceived criticism introduces toxicity into our lives.

In our position as a celibate couple who blog regularly, we feel under the microscope quite often, and that’s to be expected because of our choice to share publicly about our personal experiences. We are coming to realize that there will always be people who claim our relationship is something that it’s not, tell us that we ought to wear our celibacy on our foreheads if we don’t want to be perceived as a threat, claim for any number of reasons that we should stop talking about celibacy altogether, and/or disapprove of our lives in one way or another without ever telling us directly. Learning how to cope with these various levels of scrutiny is a challenge. It’s no wonder that a lot of LGBT Christians, ourselves included, develop people-pleasing tendencies. Though the temptation to please others has an obvious source, we have to admit that focusing our efforts on appeasing others’ judgments is unhealthy.

There’s a fine line between defending oneself and engaging in people-pleasing. In today’s political climate, almost every LGBT person encounters situations where he or she needs to respond to another person’s comment or action. Many LGBT Christians can feel like our place in churches we call “home” is precarious. Saying the wrong thing in the wrong environment can lead to significant consequences. However, always sitting on the edge of one’s seat because one expects to be shown the door can cause an any person to shift from standing up for himself or herself towards dangerous forms of people-pleasing. It’s even possible for people-pleasing to become idolatrous.

Constant people-pleasing behaviors can lead to obsession over what others think. When a person has experienced significant judgment from others, he or she can develop a habit of trying to get inside of the critic’s head. When we assume what another is thinking, we can imagine the worst even in the best of situations. A snowball effect can begin wherein we observe that a member of our parish has glanced at us with an odd facial expression and, not even five minutes later, we are imagining that person must be one step away from complaining about us to our priest. All this happens entirely inside our own heads without any external conversation. In the absence of dialogue, panic arises from envisioning that everyone else is making assumptions about how we live our lives. But regardless of how common a reaction this is, people-pleasing tendencies are destructive because they can put a stopper on real conversation.

People-pleasing can get in the way of seeing where we actually fall short. Obsessing over what other people think can prevent us from searching our own hearts. Feeling the need to prove constantly that we are living faithful lives can block our abilities to appreciate how sin interferes with our relationship with God. Constantly worrying about whether a particular person from church thinks we are not living a proper sexual ethic takes up the headspace necessary to contemplate our tendencies toward pride, anger, and other passions that have nothing to do with sex. From time to time, we notice ourselves thinking more about what might be offending other people in our faith tradition than taking inventory of the real ways we are offending God. We could be a lot more patient, loving, joyous, thankful, and forgiving if we did not devote so much of our time to worrying about other people’s thoughts. The noise created when a person cares so much about what other people think can block God’s still, small voice almost entirely.

When we get caught up in people-pleasing, we do a disservice to others by catering to unreasonable expectations. Doing everything possible to appease another’s sensibilities can be harmful to that person’s spirituality. In instances where others really are making unfair judgments about us, changing totally innocent behavior just to please them effectively removes from them all responsibility for taking a look at their own spiritual lives. Oftentimes, the things that offend us are indicative of the sin lurking in our own hearts and minds. When we make aggressive attempts to people-please, we can enable the judgment within another’s heart and discourage him or her from examining that.

Additionally, we often end up drawing artificial lines and second-guessing behaviors that are totally innocuous. We fret over questions that arise in our own minds: “Will someone find it inappropriate for Lindsey to refill Sarah’s water glass when we’re eating together at church? Is sitting next to or across from each other at the table more likely to result in gossip about the intimacy of our relationship?” As we write this, we’re a bit ashamed of how absurd those questions sound. Maybe some people do analyze our every move in public. Maybe no one does. But whenever we listen to the internal voice that compels us to worry about that, we stop relating to the world as our authentic selves, and we start putting on various masks to everyone else around us. More often than not, attempting to please others leads us to behave rigidly and create arbitrary boundaries that we would never consider implementing during times when we’re tension-free and hanging out with the folks who know us best.

Focusing so much on how certain people see us prevents us from being able to connect meaningfully with others. If we’re worried constantly about what other people think, it’s virtually impossible to get to know those folks as people. When interacting with a person who we know holds some kind of unfair judgment against us, sometimes we have difficulty seeing beyond that judgment. We have trouble remembering that the person we are looking at is a human being who bears the image of God and cannot be reduced to his or her incorrect judgment on the issue in question. Seeing a person as nothing more than a puppet for a particular ideology is dehumanizing and unchristian, and we need to put a stop to that.

Caving to the temptation of people-pleasing distracts us from living into and discerning our vocation. When we do this, we shift away from living a vocation of hospitality, intimacy, vulnerability, and shared spiritual life that is turned outward to the world. Instead we adopt a vocation of, “Do what’s necessary to keep everyone happy with us and prevent them all from realizing that we’re actually human.” This latter “vocation” is no vocation at all. When we are trying to avoid doing anything that rubs another person the wrong way, we can find ourselves paralyzed and doing nothing at all. Vocations involve striving to manifest the Kingdom of God to the world. Doing nothing for fear of upsetting another is a poor witness. We might even go as far as saying it’s burying our talent in the ground. Not only that, it is entirely self-centered and self-serving to behave as though one’s purpose in life is nothing more than, “get through while ruffling the fewest feathers.”

We know we’re not the only LGBT Christians who struggle with the temptation towards people-pleasing. Sometimes it can seem that the only way to have one’s voice heard is strict adherence to all of the expected social and cultural norms of one’s faith community, even if there’s space for more varied discussion in one’s Christian tradition broadly. Perhaps one of the most widely destructive aspects of people-pleasing within the LGBT Christian conversation is privileging of certain terms and key phrases (e.g. “Side B” and “gay sex is a sin”) as the only possible indicators of a person’s theological orthodoxy. Naming the ways that we drift towards people-pleasing personally has been challenging, but we hope that discussing some of its effects on our lives will encourage everyone participating in conversation about LGBT people in the Church to consider ways in which this behavior stunts further development of dialogue. We’re grateful for all of your prayers for us and our vocation as we, with God’s help, work towards ridding our lives of this and other destructive tendencies.

Comment Policy: Please remember that we, and all others commenting on this blog, are people. Practice kindness. Practice generosity. Practice asking questions. Practice showing love. Practice being human. If your comment is rude, it will be deleted. If you are constantly negative, argumentative, or bullish, you will not be able to comment anymore. We are the sole moderators of the combox.

5 Thoughts on Shifting Conversation Away from the Culture Wars

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We know many people who are surprised that we chose to become part of a Christian tradition that takes a conservative approach to questions of sexual morality. We’ve shared in previous posts that to us, LGBT issues are not the most important theological considerations when compared to other points one might explore when deciding where to attend church. To our way of thinking, questions of LGBT rights don’t even come close when one views the broader range of traditional Christian tenets related to Christology, sacraments, scripture, ecclesiology, and so on. We do view moral formation as imperative for living into the fullness of our Christian tradition, but have never been ones to choose a church primarily because of where a particular tradition stands on questions such as whether same-sex couples can be married. However, we’ve observed that in both our current and previous Christian traditions, depending upon the parish there can sometimes be a tendency to focus conversations about the Christian life exclusively on culture war issues. We think this approach is enormously problematic because the Christian life is about so much more than a list of thou-shalt-nots. Some people fear that shifting conversation away from the culture wars means ignoring morality altogether and adopting a relativist mindset where all kinds of behavior are equally acceptable. We disagree strongly with this perspective and believe that moving beyond a culture wars framework of morality is essential for discussing moral issues within Christianity and sharing Christ with others.

We’ve found that in conversations with people who are interested in Christianity, emphasizing central concepts from the Gospel is especially important. The Gospel is good news and presenting it as anything less is harmful. We can mistakenly believe that the Gospel is easy to understand and live fully because it has been given for all people. But if we stop and think more deeply about the life of Christ, how could we reasonably infer that anything about his way of interacting with the world was easy? The Gospel invites us to orient our whole lives towards Christ, and doing so is a daily challenge for most. Shaping one’s life as Christo-centric necessitates giving over one’s whole being. This is the lifelong task of every Christian, and giving so much attention to culture war issues in conversations about Christianity reduces being a follower of Christ to obeying a list of do’s and don’ts’. Focusing on the good news of the Gospel does not mean sugarcoating its message or the difficult parts of following Christ. It does not mean hiding your Christian tradition’s teachings about LGBT issues or other controversial matters, or pretending that these teachings are unimportant.

We’ve learned that when engaging in conversation with people who disagree with us on one matter or another, it’s essential to maintain a welcoming posture and recognize that all people who seek Christ are encountering him in many different ways at different times in their lives. Everyone is on a journey, and none of us knows where other people have been or are headed. As Christians, our encouragement should help point other people towards Christ. Often, we are unaware of other people’s processes when making moral decisions, or what they may or may not be working on with their pastors, priests, or spiritual directors. When our bishop visited our parish a couple of years ago, one of our fellow parishioners asked him a question about Christians who are lax on moral issues. Our bishop responded by telling a story about a person with a complicated orthodontic problem who had changed doctors. The new orthodontist examined the patient and viewed his x-rays, but couldn’t understand why the previous orthodontist had approached the patient’s problem in a particular way. At the same time, he also recognized that without a full record, he had no idea what the previous orthodontist had to work with when first meeting this patient. It’s the same with Christians and their spiritual fathers, the bishop reminded us. None of us know other people’s circumstances fully because we cannot be completely aware of everything someone else is discussing with his or her own spiritual director. Therefore, it’s best to avoid making judgments about another person’s journey to Christ.

Experience has taught us that when moral issues do arise, conversation about morality is much more meaningful and productive if anchored in the Gospel. Sometimes when responding to the question, “How should Christians live?” we fail to teach new Christians and children anything more specific than, “Be nice, do the right thing, do what God asks us to do, and don’t do the things God asks us to avoid.” It can come off almost like a set of middle school civics lessons: these are the laws we have to obey because something bigger than us says doing so is necessary for the good of society. However, the Gospel suggests that there is much more to being a Christian than following rules. In most Christian traditions, moral expectations are understood as rooted in the message of the Gospel. If a person is curious about what your Christian tradition teaches on sexual morality, it might be helpful to anchor the conversation in the account of the wedding at Cana or Jesus’ response to the Sadducees about who will be married at the Resurrection. Through our own conversations with Christians across the ideological spectrum on culture war issues, we’ve come to see that civil dialogue is much less likely to happen if one defaults to, “God says that gay sex is a sin and marriage is between a man and a woman,” or “God loves everyone equally including LGBT people,” without a further explanation rooted deeply within the tradition.

Furthermore, we’ve found that it’s rarely helpful to focus solely on moral prohibitions and fail to discuss moral permissions. When most non-Christian people think of Christian morality, then tend to jump immediately to things Christians can’t do. As Sarah discussed once before, sometimes even lifelong Christians are inclined to define morality in the negative. If you were to ask a large group of people how they think conservative Christian traditions counsel LGBT members, most would probably answer, “They tell them that gay sex is a sin.” Upon pressing further into what those traditions say that LGBT Christians should do, the majority would likely say, “Avoid gay sex.” Eve Tushnet has described this as a “vocation of ‘no,'” and highlighted the damaging effects of such an approach. Regarding other behaviors that conservative Christian traditions consider sinful, rarely have we encountered such strong, “Don’t do that!” messages. Rather, we’ve heard many more conversations about what Christians should do. In the case of, “Thou shalt not kill,” Christians don’t wag fingers and beat people over the head with commands of, “Don’t kill! Don’t do it! Avoid killing because it’s a sin!” Instead, we hear homilies about love, and we help each other toward developing greater love for all humanity. We increase respect for the lives of other humans by learning to love, not by repeating the prohibition against killing over and over again. It’s important to emphasize the moral permissions of discerning vocation because the purpose of vocation is to call us toward Christ. Focusing on “Thou shalt not” implies that life in Christ goes no deeper than avoiding sin.

Lastly, one of the most significant lessons we’ve learned from living in the midst of the culture wars is that it’s dangerous to lose sight of one’s own journey to Christ by devoting all of one’s energies to telling others how far they are from Christ. Matthew 7:3 asks us, “Why do you see the speck in your neighbor’s eye but do not notice the log in your own eye?” This verse is quoted out of context frequently by folks who wish to argue for a moral relativist position. As a result, some people dismiss this important piece of Christian teaching. It’s far too easy for any of us to see our brothers’ and sisters’ faults more readily than our own. This doesn’t mean that we can never rightly identify instances of sin in other people’s lives. The point is, it’s not our job to make assumptions about what may or may not be going on in another person’s life. It harms our own spiritual lives when we make such assumptions and allow ourselves to become self-righteous as a result. It’s spiritual poison to devote time to discovering whether another person is sinning so that we can tell ourselves, “I’m doing better than he or she is.” The Prayer of Saint Ephraim ends with the entreaty, “My Lord and King, grant me the grace to see my own sin and not to judge my brother.” While we might be tempted to tell someone else what he or she should be doing to live a holy life, we must remember that it requires a mighty divine work for us to conform our own lives to the pattern of Christ.

Living a Christian life requires that people give themselves wholly to the call. Christ calls us to follow him in hopes that we will one day be able to reflect his image and likeness fully. We do not pretend to understand everyone else’s unique situations, but we are always happy to pray for others that God will guide them towards the Truth that is Christ himself. Relative to our own formation, we know that we’re not perfect by any stretch of the imagination. We’d be curious to hear if you have other strategies from shifting conversations away from the culture wars, and we always welcome your feedback on our writings in the comment box.

Comment Policy: Please remember that we, and all others commenting on this blog, are people. Practice kindness. Practice generosity. Practice asking questions. Practice showing love. Practice being human. If your comment is rude, it will be deleted. If you are constantly negative, argumentative, or bullish, you will not be able to comment anymore. We are the sole moderators of the combox.

From Persecution to Conversation

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This post is our third contribution to the What Persecution Is series that we are exploring with Jake Dockter at The Great White Whale. This series explores faith, gender, sexuality, race, culture, and identity. We’ll be posting one post a week for this series over the next several weeks. We’d love for you to join the conversation. Please let us know if you’re posting any related content on your own blog, so we can talk with you.

Many conservative Christians perceive that traditional Christianity is under attack by the LGBT community. Society is rapidly changing. Technological advancements spark new moral and ethical quandaries. Religious demographics have also shifted considerably in the last twenty years, reflecting an increasingly pluralized environment. Traditionally believing Christians may fear being steamrolled in the name of progress without having a chance to integrate Christian beliefs fully into the decision-making process. They might experience different kinds of intolerance on an individual level as they discuss their Christian beliefs with others. It’s not terribly uncommon for Christians with traditional beliefs and practice to be dismissed as old-fashioned, out of touch, and even oppressive. Because so many other places in society have changed, some Christians in more conservative denominations see themselves as the last outpost in the culture war. Some employ metaphors suggesting churches moving away from hardline conservative stances have been invaded by various cultural cancers.

However, when people are constantly on the lookout for evidence that a cultural cancer has invaded their Christian tradition, anything can be perceived as a threat. As Sarah was recently told by a very conservative friend of a friend, “We have to kill the cancer before it kills us!” If a rainbow flag appears in the window of a nearby business, people at the church might talk about the neighborhood’s decline. If a pastor gives a homily on sexuality, many congregants perk their ears to notice the slightest deviation from acceptably conservative rhetoric. If an obviously identifiable LGBT person darkens the doorstep of the church building, people can focus an enormous amount of energy on ensuring that the “right” people continue to give the “right” answers. It does not take long before any LGBT person can feel as though he or she is seen as nothing more than a tumor to be excised.

In contexts where churches are on the lookout for invading cultural cancers, celibate, LGBT Christians can face a barrage of tests designed to prove that they are indeed the enemy of traditional Christianity. These tests run the gamut of continual questioning of what a celibate, LGBT Christian believes about marriage and sexuality, exhortations to live a life that is above reproach, expectations that the LGBT person achieves absolute perfection in the arena of sexual morality and all other areas of the Christian life, and demands that the celibate person say nothing positive of expanding legal protections for LGBT people or point out that non-celibate LGBT friends actually can and do have virtues. Some people will go so far as to suggest that an LGBT person should not even describe himself or herself as LGBT. After all, shouldn’t a celibate, LGBT Christian be aware of the pervasive cultural cancers? Isn’t it reasonable that such a person should expect to have to overcorrect to compensate for his/her sexual orientation in order to prove himself/herself nonthreatening? We’ve experienced many people who think that we somehow “owe it” to the Church to demonstrate in unreasonable ways that we’re faithful in our theology, that our way of life together is harmless, and that we have no intention of rocking the boat within the parish.

Many people demanding reassurance from celibate, LGBT Christians will reference their own spiritual journeys of feeling like refugees from their former Christian traditions that became more liberal over time. These people are quick to assert that they lost their church homes when their former denominations started having conversations about LGBT concerns. They can’t bear the thought of losing yet another congregation to the spreading perceived cultural cancers. However, these people do not realize that many celibate, LGBT Christians have also lost our spiritual homes and constantly fear losing any place in our congregations. Seemingly, these people refuse to see that one reason a celibate, LGBT Christian might be celibate is that he or she has an earnest desire to live into the fullness of a particular tradition’s teachings on sexuality. Moreover, conservative straight Christians frequently show unwillingness to have conversations with celibate, LGBT Christians to establish relationships on a more personal level. They seem to have zero appreciation for the reality that celibate, LGBT Christians constantly face being ostracized within every Christian tradition; safe places for LGBT celibates are few and far between, and that only becomes truer as more denominations transition toward liberal sexual ethics and denominations that do not change their sexual ethics show increasing fear of any LGBT presence.

We’re tired of conversations that constantly focus on how the gays persecute the Church and how the Church persecutes the gays. We, like many others we know and love, feel torn. We care enough about what our conservative friends have experienced to know that they honestly do feel persecuted by the LGBT community. We’re not interested in silencing their stories. As much as we have been hurt by cisgender, heterosexual Christians, it is challenging for us to admit that virtually everyone on both sides of this debate has experienced some form of persecution. Nonetheless, we need to begin talk about the ways Christians mistreat each other over these issues if we are to make any progress towards Christ together. We must remember that God invites all to draw near to him. If we cannot acknowledge authentically the wounds that have been inflicted upon both sides of this culture war, then we will not be able to see the Church as a hospital for all those who desire to see the Great Physician.

To open the discussion, we have some questions we’d like to ask conservative straight Christians. If you believe that the Church is Christ’s Church and the gates of hell shall not overcome it as the Scriptures tell us, then why are you so afraid that LGBT people are able to destroy the Church? Have you ever wondered what it means for you to have a sexual orientation and gender identity? Is your first instinct upon engaging in dialogue with an LGBT Christian to make assumptions about his or her sex life or to start preaching celibacy? If so, why? We look forward to reading your comments. LGBT readers, you can also feel free to fill the comment box with questions you have for conservative straight Christians.

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