Jim Minnery of the Alaska Family Action which includes the Alaska Family Council was holding a Love Your Gay Neighbor Q&A Friday night at East High and although I was tired, it seemed like something I should attend. In 2012 Minnery led a successful campaign to stop GLBT folks from being added to the Anchorage Anti-Discrimination ordinance.
There were two couches, for panelists, and narrator Jim Minnery.
Panelists (left to right)
Peter Hubbard - Pastor and author of Love Into Light: The Gospel, the Homosexual, and the Church. The book argues for the church to find better ways to deal with GLBT parishioners.
Andrew Walker - Is a policy analyst at the Heritage Foundation and the director of policy studies at the Southern Baptist Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission.
Minnery is in the middle. It gets more interesting though.
Jeff Johnston - He works at Focus on the Family. He talked about his former gay life and how he got back to the church. He now is married to a woman, though he doesn't deny he still has same-sex attractions. The link is a radio interview that - in the beginning - covers much of how he introduced himself last Friday night. He said he was not ex-gay or gay.
Melinda Selmys- She described herself as a lesbian who broke up with her long time girlfriend when she converted to Catholicism. She is now married to a man, though she still calls herself a lesbian.
Hubbard and Walker both sounded genuinely committed to love and being welcoming to LGBT folks, but also strongly committed to church doctrine. Johnston seemed like he was still figuring out who he was. I found his generalizing from his personal experience to all gay men problematic, even though he did recognize that not everyone is the same. Selmys sounded the most grounded in a reality that I could recognize.
My Take On What I Heard
Overall, it sounded like a genuine search for a way to change the church's approach to LGBT issues while staying true to 'biblical truth' (a term I heard a lot that night.)
1. Homosexuality has been treated as a special class of irredeemable sin by evangelical churches. While we helped all other sinners struggle to overcome their issues, we assumed that LGBT folks were beyond God's grace and treated them differently.
2. But homosexuality is no different from other sins. From the link to a review of Hubbard's book by Tim Challies:
"The gospel makes all the difference and the gospel is exactly what Fred Phelps and so many others have thrown away in their misguided, hate-filled attempts to address homosexuality. “If our attitude toward a gay or lesbian person is disgust, we have forgotten the gospel. We need to remember the goodness and lovingkindness that God poured out on us. God should have looked at us and been disgusted. Instead, without condoning our sin, He loved us and saved us. And I want everyone to know that kind of love!”
3. We must love our kids, yet also tell them the biblical truth. Hubbard distinguished between family relationships and church discipline.
4. Homosexuality is still a sin and having gay sex is not condoned.
What Does This All Mean?
Please read below the fold for the rest.
I couldn't help wondering what Minnery's motivation was for bringing these people here. I also was wondering if this meant that he was having second thoughts on his fight against Proposition 5 in 2012.
Prop 5
This question came up in the discussion. My notes are pretty rough, but this is what I have down for Minnery's comments:
Prop 5 was a hornets' nest; it's the reason I'm having this conference. We hurt a lot of people.
If there was any business that would deny service to LGBT person, I'd be the first to [defend the LGBT right to service]
I'd note how easily people can use phrases like "I'd be the first . . . " There are a lot of people who have already been doing that for years and years. It's a little presumptuous for Minnery to claim he'd be the first here. Especially since he led to the fight to keep LGBT people off the Anchorage anti-discrimination ordinance. Though I'd guess that this phrase just popped into Minnery's head and if he had time to think about it, he would agree with me and say he didn't mean it literally.
There's a bit more, he clarified a little.
But it's different for some issues - marriage, adoption - where the law requires [businesses] to [serve someone in a situation that violates their religious beliefs]. That crosses the line.
Why this change?
Minnery's Motivation
Let's look at Minnery's comment that culture is changing. Tim Challies, the book reviewer I cited above, is a pastor in Ontario, Canada. He writes in thereview of Hubbard's book:
It seems inevitable that same-sex marriage will soon be legalized across America; it has been the law in Canada for several years now. Meanwhile the acceptance and celebration of homosexuality is becoming a cultural shibboleth, a means of determining who has a voice worth hearing and who does not.
What I hear in this, and other things I read online, is that now that homosexuality is becoming culturally and legally accepted, the evangelical church has to figure out a way to get rid of its gay bashing past. Last Friday, they outlined two possible paths:
Option one is to reinterpret the scriptures and find a way to 'discover' that homosexuality is not a sin. Perhaps science has supplanted what was known at the time the bible was written down. They discussed Matthew Vine's book, God and the Gay Christian, which apparently does find ways to make the bible and homosexuality compatible. Walker pretty much trashed Vine's thinking in the discussion. (I found a review of Vine's book by Walker here.)
Option two is to treat LGBT folks with love, but not compromise biblical truths. I understand that approach, because it's like the one I tried to take as a teacher - treat my students with warmth and respect, but still hold them to high academic standards. But in the church, it still means labeling them as sinners. We still love you and will help you find God's grace.
They even had one now married (to a woman) formerly gay man and one Lesbian who is now married to a man. What was that all about? It seems it was to show that you can stop acting on your same-sex attraction when you have something more meaningful. I'd note I can believe both their stories - they didn't deny they still had same-sex attractions - but their path wouldn't work for everyone. And the panelists acknowledged this. Some LGBT folks would have to stay single and celibate.
So, is this because they are remembering their Christian principles of love? Or simply a way to keep the church relevant in modern America? I suspect that it's both. For some people more of one than the other.
Angels Dancing On The Head Of A Pin
I'm amazed as I watch the dedication of people living in 2014 to this book that was written over a span of more than a thousand years starting over 3000 years ago by people who lived in worlds so totally different from our world today. I also wonder at what it takes to believe in such a book as the literal and absolute moral truth. I can easily read it as metaphorically telling us morals through stories - like Aesop's Fables or how some Alaska Native cultures use stories to teach proper behavior.
The idea that the literal word of the bible is the ultimate test of right and wrong just doesn't work for me. With so many different bibles written in so many different languages, how does one even know the literal bible? Do we take a Hebrew bible? One written in Aramaic? Greek? Latin? English? And of these, which translation? And which interpretation?
And I'm constantly struck by what seem to me to be inconsistencies. Something like homosexuality is blown up for a time as a particularly egregious sin. Yet other biblical 'abominations' such as eating shellfish [a funny link] are ignored. And I don't hear US evangelicals calling for the stoning of adulterers. Nor do I hear much complaint about violations of the Fourth Commandment. (Aren't the Ten Commandments the most important laws?) Do you see any evangelicals railing against businesses that are open on Sunday?
Science seems to be brought in when it supports biblical truth. Hubbard, in the quote above, cites sociology to support the notion "that a child does best with his natural father and mother." But what do they do with psychological and biological science on homosexuality that doesn't support their biblical truth?
I guess for me, it boils down to letting everyone follow their own religious beliefs. The problem arises when they want to impose those beliefs on others. Evangelicals shouldn't practice homosexuality or have same-sex marriages. But they also should NOT impose their beliefs on others. And when we have conflicts between the religious (or non-religious) beliefs of people, we have to sift through the issues to determine which person is most harmed. So, if a wedding photographer who doesn't believe in same-sex marriage is asked to photograph a same sex marriage - we have to parse whose rights are more violated.
I didn't have an official photographer at my wedding so I don't personally feel a wedding photographer is critical to getting married. But for people - including wedding photographers - who believe in the whole big wedding package, a wedding without a photographer isn't a wedding. Such a photographer isn't being asked to perform a wedding or even worse, get married to a same-sex partner. But I can understand a photographer believing that her photos of a same-sex wedding could be seen a form of supporting, even promoting, an act she felt was wrong. But I can also see a same-sex couple - especially one living in a small town where there is only one photographer - feeling they are being discriminated against because of their sexual orientation, no differently than if a restaurant refused service based on that.
Life is full of conflicts and reasonable people can work them out. In this situation, a photographer ought to be able to suggest other professional photographers who would do the job. A gay couple would probably not want someone who wasn't supportive to take the photos of their wedding. But people caught up in the passions of the moment won't necessarily be reasonable.
You can see the issues raised Friday night can lead one down countless paths and we could go on and on exploring them. But I did think it significant that evangelicals now see their harsh treatment of LGBT folks as a liability and are now trying to figure out how to jettison that approach yet stay consistent with their version of biblical truth.
I've already posted a short video of the question and answer to: What should I do if my son says he's gay and wants to bring his partner to a family function?
And earlier version of this was posted at the blog What Do I Know?