What if God called you on the phone with an important message about your life—
—and someone else took the message.
Hello?
How important would it be for that person to get the details right?
God said that you are going to fall in love someday. But you can never have sex or get
married. Or no, you can never fall in love or have sex or get married.
Or was it...you can fall in love but you can't have sex until you get married?
Anyway, it was something like that.
Would you be satisfied with just the general gist of the message?
Basically, the gist of it? You, sex, no.
You'd want the details, right? You'd want all the nuance. This is your life we're
talking about. It's not just a yes or no question.
So why is it that when we talk about the Bible and homosexuality, we treat it like a yes
or no question and gloss over all the nuance?
Brothers and sisters, the Bible is clear. Homosexuality? No. So don't be gay.
But if you are gay, just don't be!
But if you are, don't say "gay"; say "same-sex attracted" and get some therapy
so you won't be!
But if you still are, it's simple: Man should not lie with man.
So don't have sex. Or get married. Or fall in love, or hold hands, or anything in the
category of homosexuality.
You know, like, being gay.
It's not enough to just say that the Bible does (or doesn't) condemn "homosexuality"
as a broad concept. For me, as a gay Christian, the question is much more nuanced. I want
to know how to live my life in a way that pleases God. And that's not about sex.
Let's take a nuanced look at the Bible and homosexuality from the perspective of someone
whose life this is actually about.
Growing up, my understanding of this wasn't nuanced at all. I thought people just chose
to be gay and that it was a sinful choice.
As a devout evangelical, I never would have chosen to be gay.
When I realized as a teenager that I was attracted to guys and not girls, I thought it was a
phase I could grow out of.
And when that didn't happen, I thought if I prayed about it and trusted Christ and had
enough faith and got the right therapy and never acted on my feelings that eventually
God would make me straight.
I called myself straight even though I wasn't, I dated girls even though I wasn't attracted
to them, and I went to Christian groups called "ex-gay ministries" where I met lots and
lots of miserable people desperately trying to change their orientation for God. But it
wasn't working.
I saw so many people end up hating themselves when their orientation didn't change, lonely
and depressed while their Christian friends back home kept thinking it was a choice and
that they were rebelling against Jesus.
I wrote a book about this. It's called Torn: Rescuing the Gospel from the Gays-vs.-Christians
Debate.
Now today, the majority of Christians have come to realize that sexual orientation isn't
just a choice—and much of the "ex-gay" movement has collapsed as so many of the leaders
who once claimed God had made them straight have since admitted that it wasn't true.
Even many of the most conservative churches are recognizing that some people are just
always going to be attracted to the same sex and not the opposite sex—in other words,
gay.
But even with that realization, in many churches, the conversation still isn't very nuanced
when it comes to what the Bible says to those people.
Basically, the gist of it? You, sex, no.
Many churches, Christian colleges, and other organizations have focused on taking a position against same-sex
sex, treating a gay or bi person's experience as merely a sexual temptation. I understand the
intent, but when I realized I was gay, the big questions on my mind weren't about sex.
They were about my future, about love, and romance, and companionship, and loneliness,
and how I could live, and what my purpose was.
So when the church treats gay and bi folks, or anyone in the LGBT community, as if the
only thing that matters about our experience is sex—and specifically not having it—it's
dehumanizing. A biblical approach that stops at sex is worse than useless to gay and bi
Christians.
Catholic writer Eve Tushnet—who is, herself, celibate—put it this way:
So as we turn to the Bible on this, we need to make sure we're asking a nuanced question.
Instead of just asking if the Bible has a "yes" or "no" position on "homosexuality,"
let's begin by asking what the Bible says to someone like me:
"Given that I'm gay, how should I live as a Christian? What might my future look
like?"
To answer this question, we have to look deeper than just passages about sex. We need serious
Bible study. Because when I read the Bible, there's no passage saying, "If you're
a gay Christian, here's what you should do," so what can I learn from what the Bible
does say?
First, it's clear from the beginning that God designed human beings to be in relationship.
In Genesis, after creating the world and seeing that each part of it is good, God creates
the first person, Adam—and says that something is not good:
"It is not good that the man should be alone."
Notice, God doesn't say, "Yo, Adam, I'm sufficient for you!"—God recognizes Adam
needs human companionship. So God makes Eve, someone of his own flesh, to be his life partner.
This human longing for companionship is a common theme throughout Scripture—and not
just any person will do. When Jacob falls for Rachel but is tricked into marrying Leah,
he works another 7 years for the chance to marry Rachel. Because he wanted somebody,
not just some body. He wanted to be with the person he loved.
And we see throughout the Bible that this matters to God—that companionship, that
marriage bond, matters to God. Yes, there are some people who thrive in singleness and
solitude; we're all different. But even the Apostle Paul, who himself felt a call
to celibacy, recognized that it was unrealistic and inappropriate to try to force that calling
onto everyone. He wrote:
Paul saw celibacy as a higher calling than marriage, but even Paul didn't think everyone
was cut out for celibacy.
Okay. But what does that mean for me? Same-sex marriage wasn't part of the cultures where
the Bible was written, and sexual orientation is never explicitly discussed.
As we've grown to understand more about sexual orientation from research and listening to
each other's stories, Christians around the world have been wrestling with how that informs
our application of Scripture to these modern-day questions.
Many Christians argue that no one should be excluded from marriage, so the most compassionate
approach is to apply the same biblical marriage standards to everyone, making allowances for
orientation—so that same-sex couples are held to the same standards as opposite-sex
ones. These Christians point out that there's evidence all around us of same-sex couples
whose relationships are bearing the same kind of good fruit we see in healthy heterosexual
relationships.
But other Christians argue that marriage needs to remain a heterosexual institution—not
just because those are the examples we have in Scripture,
but because every explicit mention of same-sex sexual
behavior in the Bible is negative.
And that's true. There are a handful of those passages, and LGBT people sometimes
call them the "clobber passages," feeling that they've been used too often as weapons.
So what are these so-called clobber passages?
The first of them is the Sodom story in Genesis 19, where two angels visiting Lot are threatened
with gang rape by an angry mob. (That single threat, by the way, is what gave rise to
the misconception that Sodom was a "gay city" even though the text says no such thing.)
In Judges 19, a similar story in Gibeah has townspeople again threatening a foreign traveler
with gang rape. But in this case they end up raping and murdering his concubine instead.
In Leviticus 18–20, Moses gives the Israelites a list of rules to separate them from nearby
cultures, including some rules Christians follow today and some we don't. One of those
rules is "do not lie with a man as with a woman," which many scholars believe references
the widespread male temple prostitution at the time.
In Romans 1, Paul describes people who turned from God to worship idols and engaged in lascivious
sex acts as a result—again, possibly a reference to temple prostitution and related sex rites.
He describes these people as "inflamed with lusts" and enmeshed in all kinds of sin—although,
ironically, his ultimate point here is to remind his audience not to point fingers because they
are just as sinful.
And finally, in two passages, Paul refers to two sinful groups, the "arsenokoitai"
and the "malakoi," but without giving us much context for who they were. The structure
of the word "arsenokoitai" suggests some kind of male-male sexual behavior, but scholars
are fiercely divided on who exactly these people were, and what it was Paul was critiquing.
And that creates a lot of confusion for people trying to make sense of these passages. For
example, growing up, I read the popular NIV translation of the Bible, which variously
translated these words as "perverts," "homosexual offenders," and "male prostitutes."
But following a rise in the visibility of gay Christians and a backlash among some
conservative Christians, the NIV retranslated these words to condemn "men who have sex
with men." Someone picking up an NIV Bible for the first time today wouldn't know that
it hadn't been translated that way before 2011.
Still, each of these six passages mentions some form of sinful same-sex sexual behavior.
And I've just skimmed the surface of these passages; there's plenty to discuss about
all six of them. But it's unfortunate that when Christians talk about homosexuality and
the Bible, we spend almost all of our time arguing about just these passages.
Because if you've been paying attention, you've hopefully noticed something important: None
of these passages actually answers our nuanced question about how a gay Christian like me
should live or what my future could be. Here are stories of attempted gang rape and orgies
in idol worship, but there's nothing here about people like me living out their years
one way or another. I mean, there are no stories of how Adam and Steve were happily married,
but there are also no stories of how Adam and Steve were in love but had to keep their
distance because God said so, or how God decreed that Steve had to live out his life alone.
Like so many other issues we face today, sexual orientation is just never discussed in the
Bible. And people on both sides will try to argue that the Bible's silence on that
point is automatic evidence for their side, but it's not that simple. So we're left
trying to make arguments about love and relationships and people's futures on the basis of a handful
of passages that aren't really about those things.
And when you're gay, it's so frustrating to hear people tell you that a passage about
gang rape is supposed to answer your question about loneliness and whether you can ever
fall in love—not even sex, just love!
One of the big challenges of Bible interpretation is that you always have to consider context—not
only the context of a passage within the Bible itself but also the historical and cultural
context.
When the New Testament speaks negatively of tax collectors, it's not that tax collecting
itself is sinful, it's about the sinful practices that tax collectors of that time
were known for. If you don't know that context—if you don't know about the historical practices
of tax collectors in Jesus' time—it would be easy to misunderstand what the Bible is
saying.
Christian theologians have an old adage about this: "A text without a context is a pretext
for a prooftext." In other words, you can't properly interpret a Bible passage without
knowing the context.
For instance, when the Israelite men are told in Leviticus not to lie with other men, they're
also forbidden to get tattoos, cut their hair, or shave. Later, in the New Testament, Paul
requires women to wear head coverings and requires men to have short hair. But most
Christian theologians agree that these rules are tied to specific contexts—the significance
of long hair for Paul or tattoos for the Israelites was very different from the significance of
those things today. Tattoos, for instance, had a religious significance in that culture;
they weren't just decoration. And that understanding helps us interpret those passages.
So if we're going to be consistent in our biblical interpretation, we need to consider
context with these passages just as much as we do with all the others. What type of
same-sex behavior was being practiced at the time? What was its cultural significance?
What points were these passages trying to make in context, and how do we apply that
to our situation today? Is there a difference between gang rape or lusts out of control
and two people who want to commit their lives to each other? And if so, how does that affect
our answer to the question about a gay Christian's future?
This is Bible Interpretation 101; Christians do this all the time, and yet on this one
topic, some Christians are reluctant to use the same standards they'd use to interpret
any other passage—instead, they stick with a surface reading that we wouldn't settle
for anywhere else. I think part of the reason is that many people still think being gay
is really just about sex, and they don't want to be seen as loosening standards on sexual immorality.
So they draw a line in the sand, using a broad term like "homosexuality," and they end
up condemning not only same-sex sex, but also same-sex romance, and sometimes even
just people admitting that they're gay or bi. Gay and bi Christians then find ourselves
marginalized and misunderstood, and we end up in a weird place, where compassion is being
pitted against Scripture, which isn't how this is supposed to work.
Anytime compassion and Scripture seem to be pulling in opposite directions, that's a
pretty big red flag that something somewhere has gone horribly wrong. History has taught
us that's a flag we can't ignore.
A century and a half ago, Christians in the United States were similarily divided over
another big issue: slavery. There were clear Bible passages that seemed to explicitly allow
slavery, and yet many Christians seemed to know instinctively that that couldn't possibly
be right.
There were, of course, slaveholders who were happy to cite Scripture to justify what they
already wanted to believe. But I'm not talking about them. If you read the writings of the time, you'll find that
there were also devout Christians who were deeply disturbed by slavery and very much
wanted to oppose it, and yet were afraid to do so because they couldn't get past what
seemed to be the clear, consistent witness of Scripture.
In 1846, Leonard Bacon wrote...
Likewise, respected Bible scholar Moses Stuart wrote in 1850 that those who wanted to abolish slavery...
Again, he did not like American slavery! But he didn't believe
abolition could be reconciled with Scripture.
Church historian Mark Noll has written about this in his book The Civil War as a Theological
Crisis. And it's easy to understand how the slavery debate was, like the sexuality
debate today, something of a theological crisis. It seemed to be compassion vs. Scripture.
As Noll puts it:
See, a common argument of the day was that even if slavery seemed wrong to you and abolitionism
seemed right, you couldn't trust that feeling, because it was based on culture and human
reasoning, not on the Bible—and people's hearts can be deceived. Henry Van Dyke preached
this in 1860:
Whoo! Now you might be thinking, "Wait, isn't there a biblical case for abolishing slavery?"
Of course there is, and I think it's a strong one. The entire New Testament is built on
the idea that the spirit of the law wins out over the letter of the law. In this case,
the letter of the law allows for practices that were common when the Bible was written,
but the spirit of the law pushes clearly and consistently toward greater grace and mercy
and equality and freedom and love. This is incredibly clear to us today. Attempting
to make a biblical case for slavery would require putting the letter of the law above the spirit
of the law, which the New Testament repeatedly reminds us not to do. The clear thrust of
Scripture is toward freedom and equality.
But even though this is obvious to us today, Christian abolitionists who made this argument
at the time were widely viewed as heretics, on a slippery slope to throwing out the Bible.
As Noll explains:
It was far easier to just point to these texts and say, "Look, there it is in black and
white. The Bible says it; that settles it." But in cases like these, the simple answer
isn't always the right answer. Good Christian theology requires nuance. It's important
that we read and interpret the Bible in context, and it's important that we check our interpretation
by looking at the fruit it bears in the lives of real people. Good theology—good biblical
interpretation—should always bear good fruit. If it doesn't, that's a sign that you may
need to prayerfully recheck your interpretation.
And that's not a new idea. This is how Jesus taught us to interpret and apply the Scriptures.
Just look at the Sabbath controversy in the New Teatament. For Jesus and his contemporaries,
one of the most important Scriptural laws was the Sabbath law—from sundown on Friday to
sundown on Saturday, you weren't supposed to do any work. So when Jesus healed a man's
hand on the Sabbath, it was a big deal. Other religious leaders were outraged; how could
Jesus justify breaking the Sabbath law?!
If I had been Jesus, I probably would have just said, "Healing doesn't count as work!
I'm Jesus; healing is easy for me!" But Jesus made a very different argument. He said:
This is kind of a weird argument. Jesus wasn't saving the guy's life; he just healed his
hand. And the alternative wasn't to kill him! He could have just not healed it, or
healed it another day.
But Jesus' point here seems to be that doing what's right requires looking beyond just
the letter of the law, because the real-world impact of our actions matters. And he gives
them examples of this, like:
Essentially, Jesus is saying, "You want a clear example of work on the Sabbath? How
about pulling a child or an ox out of a well. That's work. No one's going to argue
about whether that's work. And work is forbidden on the Sabbath, right? But wouldn't you
do it anyway? Or are you really going to let your child sit in a well overnight?"
In other words, the rule is important, but God cares about people more than rules. The
impact on real people matters.
Or as Jesus puts it:
Put another way, the law was made for people. People weren't made for the law. And although
Jesus uses the Sabbath law here as one of the most symbolically important laws, this
isn't just about the Sabbath. This is Jesus' approach to faithfully applying God's law
across the board, always seeing it through the lens of God's love for people.
Where the Pharisees would interpret Scripture in a vacuum and then figure out the rules and drop those rules onto people,
Jesus took each person's situation to Scripture: "Is the purpose of the Sabbath law to cause
this man to suffer? No, it was to honor God and give rest." And that focus on spirit
over letter got him accused of throwing out the Scriptures. But Jesus said he came not
to abolish the law but to fulfill it—something Christians understand in light of his death
and resurrection, and that affects our relationship with the law to this day.
Jesus claims authority on this particular point as "Lord of the Sabbath," but he also goes further
than that, suggesting that even the legalistic Pharisees should have known to approach the
Scriptures this way. Because even in the Old Testament, God says, "I desire mercy, not
sacrifice."
Now let me be clear: That's not to say that Christians aren't ever called to sacrifice. I mean, we don't
do burnt offerings anymore, but we are all called to "go and sin no more"—and that
often means sacrificing what we want for what God calls us to. But sacrifice for its own
sake isn't God's goal, and we have to be careful: It's way too easy to ask other
people to sacrifice something that you don't believe you are being called to sacrifice.
And that's what legalism often does. A legalistic approach says the letter of the law is more
important than how it affects people. It says, "Let the child sit in the well overnight.
The Sabbath law requires it. Let the man with the withered hand grin and bear it in obedience
to the rule. Let the slaves sacrifice and serve, even if it seems unfair. God allowed
the slavery, not me, so who am I to outlaw it? Let the LGBT folks suffer, alone, for
the kingdom. God said it, not me. I'm just telling you what the Bible says."
This was the Pharisees' approach. And Jesus said about it:
Which, honestly, is how a lot of LGBT people feel about the church right now.
But Jesus' approach was different! Like the Pharisees, Jesus wanted people to live
holy lives, but for Jesus, it was never about rules for the sake of rules. It was always
about God's love for people. And when following the letter of the law got in the way of God's
love for people, it was God's love—the spirit of the law—that won out for Jesus
every time. Yes, the letter says no work on the Sabbath, but the spirit says God loves
this man too much for me to pass him by. Yes, the letter allowed for slavery in a culture
where it was commonplace, but the spirit demands freedom and equality for all people because
they are beloved by God.
Yes, the letter condemned examples of same-sex sex in contexts where it made sense to do
so. But now there are new opportunities for people to pursue love who couldn't have
before. And so the Spirit is moving many Christians to say, "Let's take a closer, more nuanced
look at this question. And let's pay attention to the fruit that we're seeing in those lives."
Because Jesus said that good trees bear good fruit and bad trees bear bad fruit.
And so when we see a lot of bad fruit and misery being borne by the church's old way
of handling this question—so many stories of depression, loneliness, pain, broken families,
people losing their faith—and then we see gay and bi people finally able to marry the
person they love and live out their lives together, supporting and encouraging one another,
and we see so many examples of good fruit being borne in these relationships, over and
over again—you know what?
I think we're right as Christians to put the spirit over the letter, to say,
the point of these passages wasn't to make these people suffer, and to support this good
fruit knowing that God's love for people reigns supreme. And when we do that, I think
that is the right interpretation of Scripture, following in the footsteps of Jesus.
If you disagree with me, okay, let's talk. But let's have a nuanced conversation, one
that goes beyond sex to talk about the real lives and vocations of LGBT people.
There's lots more to this conversation than I can fit in one video. If you'd like to
learn more about this subject, I've written a book called Torn: Rescuing the Gospel from
the Gays-vs.-Christians Debate. It's filled with stories of how this debate is affecting
real people and ways you can make a difference, whether you agree with my biblical analysis
or not. It's available in print, ebook, and audiobook formats.
I've got more videos like this on the way; if you'd like to see them, you know what
to do: Like, subscribe, and click that little bell.
And if you'd like to help me MAKE more videos like this, you can go here (patreon.com/geekyjustin) to support my Patreon—where
you can unlock rewards and bonus videos just by being a patron.
Finally, if you have feedback or questions—and I know you do—let's continue the conversation on my website
at GeekyJustin.com.
Thanks for watching. I'll see you next time.
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