I did not go to church the past couple of Sundays. For the past fifteen years or so I have led a Sunday School class at my church. We studied the Bible, choosing a book, then thoroughly discussing it, a few verses each Sunday, sometimes spending a year or more on a single book. While a few of the class members are fairly liberal, most are conservative, both theologically and politically. Most seem to sense, at least at some level, that I am far from conservative. Though we represent different sides of the political spectrum, they are my people, and we care deeply about each other. On a private and local level, they are kind, generous, courteous, gentle people. They visit the sick, feed the hungry, mentor young single mothers, have helped pay utility bills for recently unemployed families in our community, and have helped build houses with Habitat for Humanity. They have been extraordinarily kind to my family and me.
I do not lecture or preach to them, but challenge them with questions, trying to get them to see that Jesus loved the marginalized, the oppressed, the outcast and that his battle was not against private “sins,” but against the powerful systems that oppressed people—the religious and political establishments of his day, that he was, in short, a revolutionary. They love my teaching because I value their answers, their struggles with the questions. And sometimes for a while they even seem to get what I’m trying, gently, to get them to see. One of them, after reading about the early church in Acts 2 and 4, said, “They were socialists.” When I asked whether their way of life accorded with Jesus’ teaching, another commented, “It sometimes seems like Jesus was a socialist too,” or words to that effect. But then they seem just to go back to being staunchly conservative, reflexively Republican, talking of American “exceptionalism,” of global warming as a hoax, of the dependency and vagrancy of the poor, and of the evils of same sex marriage and homosexuality. Lately they seem to focus a lot on the latter.
So I did not go to church the past two Sundays. I simply could not bear to hear complaining about the SCOTUS decision on same sex marriage. What is it with these people, these so-called “Christians”? Have they no inkling of the pain they and others like them have caused LGBT people? As a straight follower of Jesus Christ who is thoroughly familiar with the scriptures in both the Old and New Testaments, I simply cannot comprehend many American Christians’ obsessive condemnation of same sex marriage. In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus tells his followers that before telling another of a speck in his or her eye, they must themselves cast out the planks in their own eyes (Mt. 7: 1-5). Conservative Christians, including many of my friends in Sunday School, have plenty of planks in their eyes. They regularly violate Jesus’ instruction. Even a cursory application of scripture suggests that Christians are complicit in far more grievous violations of the gospel than the so-called “sin” they condemn in same sex marriage.
Nowhere does either the Old or New Testament forbid same sex marriage. In fact, references to homosexuality are few, almost exclusively in the context of promiscuity, prostitution, or predation, three violations the Bible almost invariably condemns. The most celebrated passage traditionally thought to condemn homosexuality is, of course, the destruction of Sodom. But nowhere does the story of Sodom’s destruction say that Sodom’s evil was homosexuality. It seems far more likely that God’s fury at the men of Sodom results from their violation of hospitality and their intended predatory violence against their guests. When Lot offers his daughter as a substitute for his visitors, he does so not because homosexual gang rape would be a more egregious crime than heterosexual gang rape, but because the rape of his visitors would be a violation of hospitality : “don’t do anything to these men for they have come under the protection of my roof” (Gen. 19:8). Sodom’s violation of hospitality stands in pointed contrast to Abraham and Sarah’s joyful welcome of the same angelic visitors in the preceding chapter (Gen. 18:2).
The mass rape proposed by the men of Sodom is not a sexual act but an act of domination and humiliation. Historically, gang rape, both homosexual and heterosexual, has been a tool used by armies to humiliate and degrade their enemy captives. The practice is quite common even today. According to Will Storr, writing in The Guardian, male prisoners of war in Chile, Greece, Iran, Sri Lanka, Croatia, Kuwait, El Salvador, and the Congo were sexually assaulted by their captors. Storr goes on to say, “in El Salvador, 76% of male political prisoners surveyed in the 1980s described at least one incidence of sexual torture” and "a study of 6,000 concentration-camp inmates in Sarajevo found that 80% of men reported having been raped.”
In fact, according to Maria Khan, male on male rape is more common than we would like to think even in the US military; over 13,000 US military men per year are raped by their fellow troops. According to James Asbrand, a VA psychologist, “One of the myths is that the perpetrators identify as gay, which is by and large not the case. It's not about the sex. It's about power and control. In a hypermasculine culture, what's the worst thing you can do to another man? Force him into what the culture perceives as a feminine role."
The case of Sodom would appear to be similar. That the men of Sodom refer to Lot and his visitors as aliens suggests that their motive is not sexual pleasure but a desire to control, dominate, and humiliate outsiders. The proposed brutal behavior of the men of Sodom is no more comparable to same sex marriage than a gang rape in a fraternity house is to the celebration of traditional marriage in the Song of Solomon. Like the Song of Solomon, same sex marriage is about love, not hate.
Other apparent Biblical condemnations of homosexuality are similarly dubious. Paul’s attack on “men [committing] indecent acts with other men,” in Romans 1:27 (NIV) appears to refer to ritual prostitution in Greek temples, not to monogamous same sex love. The passage should be read in the context of Romans 2:1: “You . . . who pass judgment on someone else are condemning yourself, because you who pass judgment do the same things.” Other passages in the New Testament often translated to refer to homosexuality are uncertain in meaning. For example, “homosexual offenders” in 1 Corinthians 6:0 translates the Greek word arsenokoitai, which is used nowhere else in surviving Greek texts except in 1 Timothy. A compound of the Greek words for “male” and “bed,” the word, according to many scholars, may refer to boy prostitutes. Even Robert Gagnon, the most prominent anti-gay Biblical scholar, has admitted that the condemnation of homosexuality in Leviticus 18:22 refers to “homosexual cult prostitution,” not committed same sex relationships. So Biblical condemnation of homosexuality is rare and equivocal, and the scriptures appear never to condemn committed same sex relationships, only homosexuality in the context of promiscuity, prostitution, and predation. (For some of the information in this analysis, I am indebted to Justin Lee’s book Torn: Rescuing the Gospel from the Gays-Vs.-Christians Debate. New York: Jericho Books).
Many of those who judge LGBTQ people fail to condemn and even go so far as to approve evils the Bible explicitly condemns, including insatiable greed and a stubborn, almost draconian insistence on punishment rather than forgiveness. Greed is repeatedly and unequivocally condemned in both Old and New Testaments. Leviticus 25 limits private ownership of land through the Jubilee and Sabbath years. Deuteronomy 15 proclaims that there should be no poor in the land because God has provided plenty while Deuteronomy 25 requires the people to share their food with widows, orphans, and aliens. The prophets, too, condemn greed and mistreatment of the poor and marginalized. Amos denounces Israel for “sell[ing] the righteous for silver and the needy for a pair of sandals” (Amos 2:6 NIV). Micah denounces the “ill-gotten treasures,” and accuses them of deceit, lying, and violence (Micah 6:10). Ezekiel accuses Israel of being “overfed and unconcerned” and of failing to “help the poor and needy” like “their sister Sodom” (Ezekiel 16:49) and requires the people to share to the provisions of food for widows, orphans, and aliens. The Old Testament is clear in its insistence that greed is evil and that wealth must be shared.
The New Testament is even more adamant in its insistence that greed is evil. Jesus in the gospels insists that we lend to the poor without charging interest or expecting a return, tells the disciples that a camel can pass through the eye of a needle more easily than a rich man can enter the Kingdom, graphically describes a rich man condemned to eternal punishment, and bases his judgment in Matthew 25 on our treatment of the “least of these.” Paul repeatedly condemns “greed” and tells Timothy “The love of money is a root of all kinds of evil” (1 Timothy 6:10 NIV). The early church as described in Acts 2 and 4 “had everything in common,” and “distributed [their common wealth] to anyone as he had need.” In Acts 5, Ananias and Sapphira are struck dead when they fail to contribute all their wealth for common use.
So how can my right-wing Christian friends justify their complicity in an economic system based on greed and self-interest? Clearly large scale corporate capitalism as long practiced in this country is antithetical to the scriptures. How can these Christians support politicians who would deny health care to the poor, who regularly cut food stamp allotments, and who oppose raising the minimum wage, all to prevent increasing taxes on the rich? How can they justify supporting policies and politicians that would keep taxes low for CEO’s who make over 350 times as much as their lowest paid workers while simultaneously begrudging the poor enough to live on? How can privileged white suburbanites with more than they need complain about the taxes whose increase might make a little more tolerable the lives of poor minorities? How can they justify their support for a system that taxes unearned income at a lower rate than earned income or that values those who handle money more than those who care for people? And how, if they support such policies and politicians, can they call themselves followers of Christ?
One would think that followers of the Jesus who told them to forgive even their enemies would find some measure of forgiveness in their hearts and not insist on maximum punishment for wrongdoers. Have they been so panicked by their disingenuous, fear-mongering leaders that they irrationally distrust anyone who is different? In the gospels Jesus repeatedly counsels his apostles against violent resistance. He tells them to love their enemies, to pray for their persecutors, to forgive those who hurt them. When Peter asks how many times he must forgive an offending brother, Jesus tells him seventy-seven times, which is to say, an infinite number of times. When Roman soldiers come to arrest Jesus and Peter with his sword cuts off a soldier’s ear, Jesus heals the ear and tells Peter to put the sword away. And, of course, Jesus himself exemplifies the ultimate act of forgiveness when he says of his torturers: “Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing” (Luke 23:34 NIV). The New Testament particularly is unequivocal in its opposition to violence and insistence on forgiveness.
So why then are American Christians, worshippers of the Prince of Peace, so obsessed with providing for their own security that they own more firearms per capita than any other people? Why do those called to be peacemakers support policies and politicians who spend hundreds of billions of dollars per year on elaborate weapons systems explicitly designed to kill as many people as possible, including many non-combatants? Can they really say they trust God when they support such policies? I don’t think so.
And why, too, are Christians so ready to support politicians who are “tough on crime”? Why do they support some of the longest sentences in the world and a prison system that incarcerates 2.3 million people, more prisoners than any other country in the world? Why do they not cry out against the torturous isolation of solitary confinement? Against the slave labor of prisoners? Why do they condemn aliens? Aliens are, along with widows and orphans, a biblically protected class. Many from south of the border are descendants of indigenous peoples who were on this continent long before the ancestors of most US citizens and whose “crime,” migration across an artificial border, threatens less harm than speeding, of which most US citizens are guilty. Why do they allow their leaders, supposedly for the people’s protection, to torture or kill innocents? Why do they, unlike the people of almost every other developed country in the world, continue to support capital punishment in spite of repeated evidence that many innocent prisoners have been executed? And why do they regard their whistleblowers as traitors and their traitorous torturers and war criminals as heroes?
I could have mentioned many more examples of right wing Christians supporting policies that contradict scripture far more explicitly than does same sex marriage. I’ve not even mentioned their support of policies and politicians responsible for our continuing systemic racism, their complicity in the continuing genocide of indigenous peoples, and their support for policies that are destroying our air, water, soil, and climate, which they presumably regard as God’s creation.
So knowing all too well that my classmates in Sunday School are among those I have just described, I have become increasingly frustrated. And I wonder, how can these privately good, well intentioned people be so deluded? How can such loving people support a party and policies that represent fear, hate, bigotry, cruelty, and ignorance? Are they just so caught up in the relentless propaganda machine and the systems that control their lives that they cannot see their hypocrisy?
My frustration had become too much. A couple of weeks ago, I told them that I was going to take a three month break from teaching. Several, apparently fearing that my wife and I would leave them and the church, virtually begged me to return to teaching in September. And I suspect that I will do so. I love to teach; it is in my blood. But how shall I approach doing so? To be too direct or outspoken would risk losing any influence I might have with them. Perhaps because they know I disagree with them, most have shown me enough respect that they generally avoid direct political comments in class. I suppose I need to show them the same respect. So I guess I will continue doing what I have done: show them the love of Jesus and ask questions that challenge them to explore their faith and to examine their political attitudes, hoping that the gospel of the “Prince of Peace” will impact their political thinking.