That Chick-fil-A Business

I stayed clear of Chick-fil-A yesterday.

And so far, at least on this blog, I've stayed clear of the topic--not because I don't have things to say about Chick-fil-A's staunch opposition to gay rights and marriage equality, but because most of what I've had to say someone else has already said as well as I can--points about the right to free speech not being a right to be free from criticism for what one says; points about Chick-fil-A doing more than just expressing opinions, but directing their profits to promoting legal discrimination against gays and lesbians, etc., etc.

But as I was taking my daughter to her gymnastics class a little awhile ago, I couldn't help but look at all the happy, smiling Christians who were dropping off and picking up their kids...and wonder how many of them stood in a long line yesterday to eat bad fast food.

The owner of the gymnastics studio puts on Christian pop music during open gym. She exudes niceness. I saw the playful smile and wave she gave my daughter as we walked in. And I wondered if she'd gone out of her way yesterday to support a business that's fighting hard to make sure my best friend John and my cousin Jake are denied full equality in our society.

Here's one thing that's clear to me: Chick-fil-A's president stood up and said "guilty as charged" because he believes in what his company stands for. Many, if not most, of the people who stood in line on "Chick-fil-A Appreciation Day" were sincere. They thought they were doing something good. They thought they were standing up for what is right.

Many of the people who deliberately directed money towards Chick-fil-A--knowing it to be an organization that is committed to using some of that money to help marginalize my gay and lesbian neighbors--many of those people mean well.

The difference between us lies not in our disposition to care about and pursue what we take to be good. The difference lies in what we take to be good.

And so, when I call what they're doing a sin--and I do--they're likely to shake their heads and call me crazy. They won't repent of this sin, because they don't think it is a sin. They don't think they're courting divine displeasure. They don't believe they are violating the teachings of Jesus. I think they are, but they don't. Just as they think my gay and lesbian loved ones are violating God's will, even though I am confident this is false.

Let me say a few words about my perspective. I think that biblical inerrancy leads people to plug up their ears with Bible verses so that they don't hear the anguished cries of their gay and lesbian neighbors. I think that the result is a failure of love--a failure to adequately live out the love command of Jesus.

Not that they don't mean to love gays and lesbians. They do. But what would we say about a misguided father who, out of the sincere belief that play is ruinous to children, systematically denies his child the right to play? Such a father is doing deep and lasting harm to that child. It's not the sort of thing a loving father would do if he knew what he was doing. And so there's a sense in which the father is failing to do the loving thing, even if his motives are loving. There's a disconnect between his motives and his actions caused by a false belief.

Likewise, there's a deep disconnect between the motives of many conservative Christians and the character of their actions--a disconnect created, more often than not, by an allegiance to an untenable theory about the Bible, a theory about how the Bible's words are connected to divine self-disclosure, a theory that, as I see it, cannot stand up to any serious engagement with the Bible's actual content and history.

But these people aren't biblical scholars. They often don't realize they are endorsing a controversial theory about the Bible when they equate every passage with the Word of God. They've never seriously considered any alternative view. Their failure to recognize that they could be wrong in their theory about the Bible isn't the result of a pride so great they don't think they are capable of making mistakes on matters as profound as the nature of divine revelation. It's more a result of simply failing to see that there is a controversy here.

It's like when you look through a pair of sunglasses at the world, and after awhile you forget that the glasses are there coloring what you see. It's not overweaning pride at work. It's simply the fact that no one has pointed the glasses out to them and invited them to look at the glasses themselves.

And so, unaware of the controversial character of their theory, they cannot take seriously the idea that the Bible might contain the prejudices of its human authors. Ancient Jewish culture was homophobic. And--big surprise--homophobic ideas come out in a few scattered passages. Is this God's eternal Word, or is it the filter of human fallibility and small-mindedness manifesting in the Bible's pages? Can we view this collection of texts as sacred, can we lend it deep authority, let it provide the organizing narrative of our lives, without treating it as so infallible that we have to follow it even when the neighbors we are called upon to love cry out in despair, crushed by the oppressive application of a few isolated lines of text? Can we judge prophesy by its fruits, as the Bible recommends, even in relation to the Bible itself?

I've argued that we can (here, for example). And if we do, what follows? To know the fruits of the categorical condemnation of homosexuality--to know the fruits of what Chick-fil-A so proudly endorses--we need to look at how this teaching affects our gay and lesbian neighbors. And I don't mean that we should look at whether they get what they want or not, but that we should look at how their lives go.

Those of us who have really paid attention to our gay and lesbian neighbors, who have listened to their collective witness, have consistently come away with an inescapable conclusion: The traditional Christian teachings on homosexuality have deeply poisonous fruit. They help drive people to suicide and despair. These are teachings that are anti-evangelical in their effect, twisting and distorting the relationship that gays and lesbians have with God. The signs of spiritual awakening--the fruits of the spirit--tend to flood in only after gays and lesbians have shaken off and rejected these teachings.

I cannot make the case for all of these claims in a blog post. My point in sharing these things is to provide a context for understanding what I have to say. My point is that these lessons, these insights about the poisonous effects of traditional Christian teachings, come from paying sustained, compassionate, open-minded attention to our gay and lesbian neighbors. But for so many Christians, the very thought of such attention feels like a betrayal of God. To open oneself up to what our gay and lesbian neighbors have to teach us, given their outrage and hurt, amounts to opening ourselves up to being proved wrong. And courting the possibility of error--when what would be declared erroneous is something Paul expresses in his epistle to the Romans--seems blasphemous, at least once you've bought the premise that anything appearing in the Bible must therefore be the very revelation of God.

And so, many of my fellow Christian brothers and sisters go through life never really hearing the stories of how our gay and lesbian neighbors have consuming poisoned fruit from the pulpit--or if they do hear these stories, they never really taking them to heart enough to understand their significance. These stories of suffering, of brokenness caused by conservative Christian teachings, are but a whisper--while the message that homosexuality is a sin is thundered from the pulpit as an unquestionable given.

And so, while I can only condemn their support of social marginalization, of discrimination, of hurtful policies and soul-crushing practices, I cannot expect that they will feel remorse for it. You feel remorse when you do something you believe was wrong. The leadership of Chick-fil-A sincerely don't believe they have done anything wrong. Those who stood in line to buy chicken sandwiches sincerely thought they were standing up for something good.

The enemy here isn't these people. It's the system of belief that has trapped them behind walls, walls that block the ability to really hear and appreciate the lived experience of our gay and lesbian neighbors. The biblical invitation to love, to open ourselves up to what lies beyond ourselves, is thwarted by a theory about the Bible that puts so much of what is other beyond the walls.

What they see within the walls leads them to unwittingly support injustice, to magnify human suffering and alienation without ever seeing that this is the consequence of what they do. From behind the walls, given what they see, it looks like goodness.

My job, then--and the job of those who see what I see--is not to call the owners of Chick-fil-A and those who support them evil or hateful or bad. Our job is to help them see the walls, and then to help hoist them up to look beyond.

And if I'm wrong abou this--if somehow I'm trapped behind walls that I don't realize are there--then what I ask is for those who think this is true to return the favor.