Agitated.
Agitated is the word that comes to mind when I think of the current debate about Gay Marriage. Agitation is everywhere, and it takes on a particularly volatile form within many church circles.
There is a lot being written right now about gay marriage. The vast majority of that writing is about which side of the issue has the moral high ground. What is not being written about is why this particular issue has induced such an explosive, emotional response.
On one hand, the church is an activist organization. This is true from its beginning: from building hospitals to big-tent revivals, from overthrowing dictators to nailing 95 Theses, from Billy Graham crusades to, well … the Crusades. The church is an organism with an activist's heart desperately looking for the next war to wage.
Is gay marriage simply the issue du jour?
Partly. But I believe the emotional drama indicates it is more than just the most available issue of the day. It is explosive. Why is that so? One important piece of this incongruent agitation is that it takes two emotionally charged issues—homosexuality and the institution of marriage, each volatile in its own right—and …
Let me see if I can paint a picture.
Have you ever heard of a binary chemical weapon? In the movies, a binary chemical weapon is a complicated bomb that houses two separate cylinders, each containing a volatile compound. It is an effective movie plotline because when the compounds mix, the resulting mixture is exponentially more powerful than either compound alone. For the audience, the expectation of these two compounds mixing creates a uniquely anxious experience.
Homosexuality and marriage are, at least for the church, two such volatile compounds. We fear what will happen when the chemicals mix.
Volatile compound #1: Homosexuality
If we rank moral and theological issues on a scale of 1 to 10, with 10 being highest, homosexuality is valued as a "10 issue" by the church. (Award-winning filmmaker Dan Merchant humorously expressed this fact in this YouTube short.)
But is homosexuality really a "10"? And why has it reached such a charged status recently? Well, I think it's because of how it relates to the Bible and to our church life.
Bible
Christians take great pride (as they should) in taking their beliefs and moral priorities from the pages of the Bible. The problem is, as far as the Bible is concerned, homosexuality is valued as a "3 issue," not a "10."
When looking at the moral teachings of Jesus in the gospels, homosexuality receives zero airtime. Zero. Jesus is silent on the issue. Either Jesus never felt it was a great enough priority to discuss, or his followers, who wrote the gospels, never felt it was important enough to quote. Either way, the gospels give it the same priority as Egyptian Interior Decoration: no comment.
Beyond the gospels the Bible is tepid at best as far as prioritizing homosexuality. (I am not talking about interpretation here, only the objective volume of writing.) There are a couple of verses about it in Leviticus. Paul makes brief comments in Romans, 1 Corinthians, and 1 Timothy. A handful of verses. Some people add a few other passages as anecdotal or illustrative, but even so, the total actual passages covering the topic represent a minuscule amount of the moral teaching of the Bible.
This total volume is far less than biblical hot-issues like paying taxes, how to treat a slave, or the proper construction of a tabernacle. More significantly, homosexuality is buried in obscurity under the hundreds, if not thousands, of verses dedicated to the indisputable "level 10 issues" of the Bible: prayer, caring for the poor, loving your neighbor, or proclaiming the Kingdom of God.
Again, I want to be very clear. I am not talking about the application of these passages: for instance do they refer to sexual orientation? Homosexual relationships? Specific erotic acts? I am also not making a moral commentary one way or another; I am only commenting on how much the Bible talks about it.
Church life
And yet, in so many religious circles today, this "3 issue" (according to the Bible) is treated like a "10." Why is that?
At this point, I am only talking about homosexuality broadly, not gay marriage. However, sexual orientation, left to itself, is a very emotionally charged issue. I want to explore some of the emotions behind it.
Disassociating: There is something in us that wants to keep distance from certain human expressions. It is a strong and repulsing sort of disassociation. It happens in many realms. My friend David wants nothing to do with the Los Angeles Lakers. There is literally nothing good that can come from that NBA team. To suggest otherwise ("they are a shrewdly run organization," "Kobe Bryant is a talented athlete") will receive nothing but the most charged counter-argument from David. A similar thing can be said about Linda and her feelings about Barack Obama. Nothing good can be said. Or my friend Andrew and his feelings about the "1 percent" (he was a demonstrator with the "99 percent" during the Occupy Wall Street campaign).
All of these are a form of dissociating. It is ironic that we disassociate from certain things as a way of defining ourselves. The stronger the disassociation, the more it means to our self-identity.
I am learning to be attentive to these charged disassociations in my own life.
As groups, we also build these disassociation dynamics. Homosexuality has been judged particularly harshly by the church in recent years. It is a "we are not them" validation issue. Just like the Los Angeles Lakers, Barack Obama, and the "1 percent," homosexuals have been identified as the "other." And just like the examples above, its rejection is powerful because it provides a validating form of self-identification: "We are not them."
This is only possible because of the illusion that homosexuality exists "out there" and not inside the church's walls. Which explains why we would never use the same rhetorically charged language for other issues. We certainly would not want to call religious arrogance a "perversion," gossip an "abomination," or consumerism the "western plague" (the way we called AIDS "the gay plague"). Those stones would fall too often back inside our sacred house. So we have built an illusion that homosexuality only exists "out there" and is thus a defilement that helps maintain our false validation. This also explains why the social punishment is so severe when a conservative Christian hero is discovered to be gay.
Valuation Incongruence: In addition to this "us versus them" dynamic, the church is also haunted by the fact that this dissociative relationship is incongruent with the biblical witness, "10 value" versus a "3 value." When a person or an organization is required to protect this incongruent position it creates profound anxiety. Deep down, we feel the precariousness of our situation. The church is working to protect the perception that a kitty cat is a lion, when it is actually only a kitty cat.
Volatile compound #2: Marriage
Marriage is also a high-priority issue among us religious folk. We have conferences, sermons, whole ministries about it, and more books on the topic than we could read in a lifetime. For many, it is also a "10 issue," because of the same two reasons that homosexuality is so explosive: the Bible and church life.
Bible
Does the Bible agree that "marriage" is a "near-10 issue"?
This time, Jesus did provide some teaching on the topic. Mostly his comments were about divorce (Matt. 5, 19, Mark 10, Luke 16). His most impactful teaching about marriage was to declare it non-normative to the human experience. Jesus taught that there is no marriage in heaven (Matt. 22, Mark 12, Luke 17). If we believe in the afterlife, which I do, then according to Jesus, marriage is a temporary reality for us. It will only be experienced in this brief life "under the sun," and it is not a lasting part of our eternal story. I am not stating that marriage is not important. But we need to remember the ways that Jesus spoke about it.
The Bible is filled with married people, to be sure. They are everywhere: Old Testament, New Testament, all over. However, we need to acknowledge the fact that the Bible may only be stating that marriage is a ubiquitous human reality, much like eating food regularly or sleeping in shelters, two human realities that we desire for all humans. It is also important to note that the Bible often treats marriage with a moral whimsy. People got married for almost any reason (without moral commentary): they get married because of winning a beauty contest (Esther), because the woman watered camels (Isaac), and because the first 699 wives were not enough (Solomon).
Okay, let's bring some balance to this. I have focused on some contrasting themes in the biblical narrative, simply to counter the absolutist status that we often award marriage. The truth is, marriage is very important in Scripture. There is no more defining argument that can be made than the fact that Jesus utilizes the metaphor of the wedding feast to define the beginning of our eternal celebration (Rev. 19, Matt. 22, and Luke 14).
I have no desire to marginalize marriage. Not at all, only to state plainly that the Bible treats marriage both with profundity and, at times, with temperance and whimsy.
Church life
We, the church, treat marriage as an issue of utmost importance. Marriage is as emotionally charged as any issue in the church.
Ironically, it is very similar to homosexuality, in regards to identity. It is the opposite side of the same coin. As opposed to being a disassociating issue, it is an associative issue.
"Marriage is our issue," declares the church.
I am not sure when this was decided, but it is clear that the church believes it is the gatekeeper for marriage. When it comes to weddings, we borrow divine authority ("in the sight of God and these witnesses, I now pronounce you …"), we host the ceremonies in our buildings, and we even pass judgment on who is "ready" to get married and who is not. That is an awful lot of power to wield.
We call it the "institution of marriage" as if it is a large stone building, a place where we, the church, get to guard the front door. But is it really our building to control? Marriage is practiced by every culture of the world and is revered in most every belief system. In reality, a couple can be wed by a pastor, a Mullah, or a rabbi; for that matter it can also be officiated by a judge, a court clerk, or if you are far enough off-shore, a ship's captain. The church is not the only doorway into the institution of marriage; it has more entrances than a shopping mall.
Yet we treat marriage like it is "ours." Be it illusion or reality, it is very intoxicating to be a gatekeeper, and that is a power structure that is not easy to give up.
The explosive: Gay marriage
So this brings us to our issue of the day: gay marriage. I'm not trying to make a judgment on whether gay marriage should be supported or rejected by Christians. I just want to share why I think this issue is so emotionally charged.
Let's imagine the issue of gay marriage as a chemical experiment. Two powerful and agitated "chemicals" have been poured together. We are the first generation to face this chemical mixture (at least in its modern form). Both of these two elements are volatile enough by themselves, but when mixed together they result in an exponentially powerful compound. Two "10-issues" mixed together. Two issues of incongruent valuation mixed together. A dissociative issue and an associative issue mixed together.
You can see why such a concoction would have the potential to explode. Now add to this mixture a pinch of ignorance (since we are the first generation to really have to deal with this issue in its modern form), a dash of political polarization, and bake the whole thing in a 24-hour news cycle. We can expect fireworks.
But what would happen if we responded differently?
In the late 70s and early 80s, I was just a boy. It was at this time that the AIDS epidemic began to spread in America. I remember the fear. I remember the agitation.
At that time the church community chose to use its extensive power, platform, and influence to condemn the outbreak. We called it the gay-plague. We separated ourselves from it and judged—when we could have loved.
I believe that most of us Christians wish we could go back 30-plus years and use that same power and platform as an influence to love. We could have started hospices, given to medical research, and fought to stand with the infected—"for I was sick and you visited me" (Matt. 25:36). Regardless of our moral beliefs, we could have embraced that moment to stand with the homosexual community in love. We missed it. That was a God-opportunity that we can never get back.
Today we have another chance.
I don't claim to know the course for these uncharted waters, but can we restrain the rhetoric? Can we temper the judgment? Can we assuage the agitation? While we maintain our moral positions, wherever that line may be drawn for each of us, and take this moment, this unique moment, to tell the nation and the world, in whatever way we can: "We love you."
Tony "The Beat Poet" Kriz is a teacher and speaker on faith and culture. His most recent book is Neighbors and Wise Men: Sacred Encounters in a Portland Pub and Other Unexpected Places (Thomas Nelson, 2012).
Copyright © 2013 by the author or Christianity Today/Leadership Journal. Click here for reprint information on Leadership Journal.
