Buttigieg vs Pence and the Politics of Misconstrual and Deflection

Rising star Pete Buttigieg, the gay Indiana mayor who's running for the Democratic presidential nomination, has recently spoken publicly about former Indiana Governor and current Vice President, Mike Pence--most recently in reference to Pence's well-known anti-LGBT commitments, which Pence (like many Evangelical Christians) roots in his religious beliefs.

Earlier today, Pence replied with the following remark: "He's said some things that are critical of my Christian faith and about me personally. And he knows better. He knows me."

What I struggle with here is what Pence is actually referring to. There are two possibilities that I'm aware of. The most obvious is the most recent, since it happened just days ago.

Here's what Buttigieg said, at a Victory Fund speech on Sunday: “Speaking only for myself, I can tell you that if me being gay was a choice, it was a choice that was made far, far above my pay grade. And that's the thing I wish the Mike Pences of the world would understand. That if you got a problem with who I am, your problem is not with me. Your quarrel, sir, is with my creator.” (You can check out the video here.)

This is a rhetorically effective way of making a point that many LGBT persons have made about their own experience of themselves: their sexuality (for LGB persons) or gender (for trans persons) is not something they chose for some reason or another. It is something they discovered about themselves. It has the kind of givenness that, for LGBT persons of faith like Buttigieg, immediately invokes the thought of divine intent: "If I was made by God, and if this part of me is sewn into my fibers in a way that seems not only a given but a fixed and unchangeable truth about who I am, then it appears as if this is part of God's original design plan for me."

What this comment doesn't do is say anything derogatory about Mike Pence's faith or character.

As someone who recently wrote a book making a Christian case for same-sex marriage, I am well aware than many Christians think all same-sex relationships are morally wrong. I am also well aware that many of these people are persons of deep faith. I don't question their faith. What I question is the accuracy of the moral conclusions they have reached.

It is possible for people of faith to disagree, and to disagree quite strongly, on which moral teachings fit best with their faith tradition, its Scriptures, and its creeds. Such disagreement does not imply any person attack on someone's faith or character.

And so, if this is what Pence was responding to, his response is a kind of non-sequitur. Worse, it is a deliberate misconstrual of Buttigieg's words to make it sound as if Pence were being attacked as a person rather than having the soundness of his views called into question. 

But maybe this recent comment by Buttigieg wasn't what Pence was responding to at all. A little bit of digging shows that this was not Bettigieg's only mention of his state's former governor from the stump. A month ago, Buttigieg had some more extensive remarks about Pence at a town hall in Austin. According to Politico, here are the key elements of those remarks:

...he previously trusted that Pence “at least he believes in our institutions” and did not consider him to be “personally corrupt.” 

“But then how could he get on board with this presidency?” Buttigieg said. 

Buttigieg said that while his understanding of the Bible was rooted in "protecting the stranger and the prisoner and the poor person," Pence's reading of the Gospel "has a lot more to do with sexuality" and "a certain view of rectitude." 

“But even if you buy into that, how could he allow himself to become the cheerleader of the porn star presidency?” Buttigieg added. 

“Is it that he stopped believing in Scripture when he started believing Donald Trump? I don't know.”

Here, Buttigieg opens with an impression of Pence that he formed before Pence became Vice President, an impression that for Buttigieg has started to crumble--because of Pence's role in the Trump presidency.

That Trump has little respect for (or even understanding of) American institutions and is prone towards kleptocratic corruption may be controversial claims among Trump's fans, but for others it seems beyond self-evident given his record. Buttigieg is clearly among the latter. And for the latter, it is surely deeply perplexing how someone who actually respects US institutions and has a sense of personal moral rectitude could function as the kind of uncritical voice and cheerleader for the Trump administration that Pence appears to be.

The reference to "porn star" presidency, of course, is a glancing way to reference the well-known fact that Trump had adulterous sex with porn stars and paid them off to keep them quiet--something that speaks to how deeply Trump defies basic standards of personal ethics to which conservative Christians like Pence cleave.

And even if Pence's version of Christian ethics focuses more on sexuality than on "protecting the stranger and the prisoner and the poor person," the latter must still be something that Christians like Pence care about if they claim to take Scripture as their guide.

To me and Buttigieg and many others, it looks as if many of Trump's policies are sharply at odds with those values--most notably his policies for dealing with poor refugees who have made a desperate trek to our borders in search of a better life. Even if we must as a nation care about security and the rule of law, the rhetorical and literal harshness of the Trump administration's approach to these desperate human beings defies the heart of what Jesus and the Jewish prophets preached. There are ways of securing our borders and upholding the rule of law that don't involve ripping babies out of their mothers' arms and creating concentration camps for refugees and refusing to consider taking in desperate refugees from war-ravaged Muslim-majority nations.

Of course, the Trump administration is hardly the first to be implicated in policy decisions that Christians ought to have trouble with. Both Democratic and Republican administrations before this one have made choices that, from the standpoint of Christian values, warrant concern or even outrage. And Trump is hardly the first president to fall short in terms of Christian standards of sexual fidelity in marriage (Bill Clinton, anyone?).

But it seems to many people today that the current administration has lifted things to a new level, especially when it comes to issues of immigration. And when one listens to the way Trump talks about his political opponents and the poor refugees who have stumbled and struggled hundreds of miles to seek a better life, there is a difference in tone. If one listens to the rhetoric of Obama and Bush and Clinton and Bush Sr. and Reagan and Carter, one would often hear expressions of compassion even in the face of hard policies justified by the perception of political necessity. One would be hard-pressed to find words that sounded gleefully cruel.

But sometimes, unless I am staggeringly misreading him, Trump appears to take a kind of pleasure in responding to the desperation of refugees with a curt dismissal like, "Our country is full." (And as Wayne Cornelius recently noted in a Chicago Tribune commentary, "The reality is quite different.")

The point is this: such a tone is one I could not imagine Mike Pence ever using. Pence calls himself a devout Christian, and he is right now the second-most-powerful politician in the United States. While the separation of church and state means Pence shouldn't use this power to, say, favor Christian churches over other religious institutions, the separation of church and state does not prevent our political leaders from having a conscience and being informed by that conscience as they make decisions. And Pence's conscience is a Christian one.

And yet, based on the publicly available evidence, Pence has been nothing but a bulwark of uncritical support for Trump and his policies.

Buttigieg's perplexity makes perfect sense to me. What does it look like for a man of deep Christian faith to find himself as vice president to Donald Trump? I guess my answer is the same as Buttigieg's: "I don't know."

But if these remarks are what Pence was responding to when he said, "He's said some things that are critical of my Christian faith and about me personally," then one would really hope for something more in response than, "He knows better. He knows me." Because Buttigieg was asking questions. Buttigieg was asking, "How could you?" To treat such questions, rooted in an apparent dissonance between Pence's outward behavior and his professed faith, as nothing but a personal attack is like...

...well, it's like when devout Christians confront atrocities that bring home the magnitude of evil in the world and feel the dissonance between the pervasiveness of such horror and the message that the world is the creation of a God of love. "How could you, God?" they cry. "How could you allow such things?"

That's not a personal attack. And even if it might be fitting for God to answer such a question from the whirlwind with something like, "You're too small to understand," Mike Pence isn't God. He's just a human being like Pete Buttigieg.

Maybe, just maybe, Pence meant something different by his response than, "How dare you attack my faith and character?" Maybe he meant to say, in some subtle way, that he was doing more to minimize the harms of a Trump presidency than it looks like to the public eye. Maybe he was saying something like, "You know me, Pete. You know my character, and so you know there is a reason why things look the way they do, even though you can't see what it is." Maybe, in other words, his comment was intended as a small bit of reassurance: "It looks bad, but I'm doing what I can."

Or maybe it was just a strategy of deflection: to push aside Buttigieg's questions and the dissonance that gives rise to them. If he pretends that Buttigieg's remarks amount to nothing more than a personal attack, he doesn't need to answer the questions or account for the perceived dissonance. He can just be indignant.

But there are many people for whom Buttigieg's questions seem like real questions that call for more than indignation. I, for one, would like to hear Pence's answers.

Human Solidarity and LGBT Issues

I've been following some (not all) of the discussion inspired by my response to the Nashville Statement that appeared on Religion Dispatches a couple of days ago. A couple of the comments motivated me to reply--including one that I've decided to post here, along with my response, since I think the issue raised--solidarity in the face of sin--is important to think about in connection with LGBT issues. (Also, Disqus marked my reply as spam for some reason, and while I hope that is corrected I want to make sure the remark is preserved here if nowhere else.)

Here is the comment:

OK, I'm struggling with this whole issue. I would probably, at least nominally, place myself in the same camp as the Nashville Statement signers. I have not signed it though. I have read it, and had issues with articles 10 & 13.

So while I share the beliefs of the statement's signers (insofar as I agree with their interpretation of scripture regarding this issue), I'm not settled on whether something like the statement is the proper approach.

I agree with this article's author that Christians ought to listen more, and do a better job of imitating the kind of love represented by the good Samaritan (and I would add the kind of love Jesus showed to the adulteress and the woman at the well). However, like many other things with God, truth and love exist on a sliding scale. We give people false comfort when we offer love without truth; and we tempt people to despair when we present the truth without love. The right place is in the balanced middle.

That said, I don't know where that middle is with this issue. This subject has grown to touch on all the social taboos (e.g. sex, politics, and religion). So, figuring out how to talk about it is difficult. When asked, I feel like I have to first give a history lesson to explain how the Church as a whole erred in the latter half of the 20th century; the Church expressed a preference for legislating people instead of loving them. In doing so, they screwed up and became the bad guy in the eyes of the world.

So, today Christians probably owe the LGBT community an apology while agreeing to disagree on whether or not homosexual sex is OK in God's eyes -- with a huge caveat that many other "respectable sins" (pre-marital sex and divorce being high on the list) are equally not OK in God's eyes. This was a huge missed opportunity to say that we are all in this together, and that the Church is where anyone can come to find help and relief from the painful consequences of our collective struggle with sin.

I think that is my version of the balanced middle. So, it is really hard for me to agree with opinions that are too heavily on the far-end of either side of the scale. I can agree with the truth in the Nashville Statement while rejecting the statement as a silly way to express that truth.

And here is my response:

You are clearly sincere in your commitment to loving your LGBT neighbors, and as such you and I are on the same side with respect to the question that matters the most. But on the question of whether same-sex sex is or is not "OK in God's eyes" (specifically when it occurs in a monogamous and loving context similar to the one that we think renders heterosexual sex "OK"), I want to challenge you just a little in connection with a remark you make.

The challenge has to do with the following remark: "This was a huge missed opportunity to say that we are all in this together, and that the Church is where anyone can come to find help and relief from the painful consequences of our collective struggle with sin." This notion of solidarity before God is important, but I believe that careful attention to the lives of our LGBT neighbors shows that the capacity for cis heterosexuals to extend such solidarity to their LGBT neighbors is compromised by traditional teachings, by imposing on the latter burdensome and often life-strangling constraints that those fortunate enough to be cis heterosexuals have no need to bear.

This is a point I spend considerable time defending in my book, especially in terms of reporting on LGBT experiences (well, not so much trans experience, since the book was focused on same-sex relationships and marriage and in that context I could not do justice to the distinct set of issues that my trans neighbors wrestle with). I can't reproduce all of that here, obviously, but there is one short passage from the book that I want to quote, since I think it sums up the difficulty of promoting solidarity in the face of sin when same-sex intimacy is condemned as sinful.:

"When it comes to the condemnation of adultery, all of us can stand in solidarity with one another, supporting each other in living up to a shared constraint--because all of us have the potential to be attracted to someone who isn't our spouse. But a social norm condemning homosexual sex does not generate solidarity. It creates us/them divisions. When a community condemns homosexuality, the heterosexual majority is imposing a constraint on a minority group, demanding sacrifices that the majority doesn't need to make." (The Triumph of Love, pp. 85-86)

There are, of course, things that can be said in response here. Someone could point out that not everyone experiences the same desires and temptations, and the same problem with solidarity noted above might arise in cases where all of us would agree that a desire some people have is for something wrong, and we wouldn't want to address the problem of solidarity by pretending that the wrong thing isn't wrong.

But we also don't want to magnify problems of human solidarity by imposing moral condemnations where they aren't called for. And in the case of homosexuality, the kind of sacrifice that the privileged majority imposes on the sexual minority cuts to things generally viewed as valuable for psychological health if not central to it: an integrated identity, a loving and stable life partnership with a suitable mate, etc. For a majority to require of a minority that they give up the hope of these things in their lives imposes unique burdens to human solidarity. Given your sincere desire to promote a Christianity in which we all can stand in solidarity in our human struggle against sin, I invite you to wrestle a bit more with this difficulty--first and foremost by seeking out and listening to the stories of Christian and formerly-Christian LGBT neighbors who have become deeply alienated from communities of faith that teach the categorical condemnation of homosexuality.

Book Trailer for THE TRIUMPH OF LOVE

With copious assistance from my son and photo contributions from several friends, I was able to create a book trailer for the new book. Okay, to be honest, my son was able to create a book trailer. I simply provided a bit of violin playing and talked about the book on camera, solicited photos, and then handed it all to him, saying, "Can you turn this into a book trailer?" Then he worked his magic. Here's the result:

Interview About THE TRIUMPH OF LOVE

I did a short interview about my new book, The Triumph of Love: Same-Sex Marriage and the Christian Love Ethic, for the press kit. I thought I'd include it here. The book is now available at a discounted rate from the publisher at the Wipf and Stock website, and will soon be available at most online book retailers.

1. What inspired you to write The Triumph of Love?

This book is probably the most deeply personal book I’ve written, because I have so many people close to me who are sexual minorities. For me, the “issue” of same-sex marriage isn’t some abstract intellectual question. It’s about people I love, about their experiences and the impact that their stories have had on my personal and intellectual journey. I wanted to write about that journey in a way that could answer a question that seems to genuinely puzzle so many conservative Christians: How can I, as a Christian, support same-sex marriage?

2. You are a philosopher by training, not a theologian. How does a philosopher approach these issues differently from theologians?

As a moral philosopher, I’m trained to think about concrete moral controversies in part by applying specific theories about the nature of morality. Christianity teaches that the heart of moral life is love, and that Jesus’ life is a model for what Christian love looks like. So what we have here is a distinctly Christian understanding of morality: the Christian love ethic. As a philosopher, I want to see what that ethic implies—in this case, for same-sex marriage. So instead of starting with biblical passages that talk about homosexuality or biblical themes about marriage and sexuality, my starting point is the love ethic, and my question is what love for my gay and lesbian neighbors demands.

3. But as Christians, we can’t ignore Scripture, can we?

Of course not. The love ethic flows out of Scripture, from the teachings of Jesus and the model of love He offered. And if we care about Scripture, we have to pay attention to that. If we try to draw moral lessons about homosexuality by interpreting isolated texts without considering what it means to love our gay and lesbian neighbors as ourselves, then we would be ignoring Scripture. If we don’t want to ignore this crucial dimension of what Scripture teaches, we should approach the interpretation of isolated texts in light of this attention to the ethic that, in Scripture, Jesus taught and modeled for us.

4. In addition to being a philosopher, you’ve also published short stories and won creative writing awards. How does that experience in writing stories affect your approach to this book, if at all?

It affects it a lot. I tell stories in this book. In fact, I think I have to, because a central thesis of the book is that love for our gay and lesbian neighbors requires paying attention to their stories. I could not do what I want to do in this book without sharing the stories of my gay and lesbian neighbors. And I didn’t set out to write an ivory tower book just for other philosophers and theologians. I wanted this to be a book that any educated reader can pick up and learn something from. Storytelling is part of that.

5. Do you think conservative Christian opponents of same-sex marriage will read this book? Should they?

I routinely hear conservative Christians ask how someone who claims to be a Christian could support same-sex marriage, given what Scripture says. Whether they agree with my conclusions or not, this book could answer their curiosity and help them to better understand why Christians like me reach the conclusions we do. More importantly, my aim in the book is not to bash conservative Christian opponents of same-sex marriage but to engage in a conversation with them. The love ethic calls us, straight and gay, to love our gay and lesbian neighbors, but it also calls us to love those we disagree with. That doesn’t always mean being “nice” or “gentle.” Sometimes love means calling out beliefs and practices we’re convinced are harmful. But in this book I’m trying to model loving engagement with those who hold opposing views. I hope that those who disagree with me will take up the invitation to discuss these matters in a spirit of love.

6. If there’s one thing you hope readers will take away from the book, what would that be?

Love begins with attention. We cannot love our neighbors as ourselves if we don’t pay attention to them: compassionate attention, empathetic attention. Whatever my readers think about the ethics of homosexual sex and same-sex marriage, I hope they come away convinced that they cannot love their gay and lesbian neighbors if they won’t listen with compassion to their stories and empathize with their lives and experiences. And this point goes way beyond gays and lesbians. Jesus especially challenged us to love our enemies and those who are lying beaten down on the roadside—in other word, those our society is most likely to treat as Other, those we are most culturally conditioned to ignore. If my book can inspire people to seek out and pay compassionate attention to someone from a group or community they’ve never really paid attention to before, I will think it a success.

What Business Does a Straight Man Have Writing a Book About the LGBT Community and Its Concerns?

"Are you LGBT? If not, why are you creating a book about us?"

Someone asked me this question the other day on social media, and it struck me as an excellent and important question, one that deserved a thoughtful answer. My forthcoming book--The Triumph of Love--aims to respond to those Christians who think that all Christian allies (not to mention LGBT Christians) are nothing but sell-outs to secular culture by explaining how and why I became an ally, and how and why my Christian faith and my Christian ethical commitments have become central to my support of same-sex marriage and LGBT equality.

But what authority do I have, really, to speak to the needs and experiences of my LGBT neighbors and the place of same-sex marriage in their lives? Do I think I can speak for them better than they can for themselves? Am I doing the straight equivalent of "mansplaining"? (God, I hope not.)

The answer I gave to my social media interlocutor seemed a fitting one to include here, and so I reproduce it (only slightly edited) below.

I think it is important for allies to speak about why it is important to be an ally. And within the Christian world, I think it is important for conservatives to hear from Christian supporters of same-sex marriage who can't be preemptively dismissed as just "defending their lifestyle."

I wrote this book, also, because there are people I love who are tired of being challenged to defend their most meaningful and important relationships, who just want to live and love without being targeted to defend their right to do so; and since my most meaningful and important relationship is not under attack I can draw some of that fire, offer some measure of the relief that I believe allies can provide.

And I write because I am full of an angry love that I feel compelled to voice.

And I believe I have an expertise about the Christian love ethic and it's implications that hasn't been clearly and fully voiced in the debates among progressive and conservative Christians (and those in between), a perspective that I believe may move that discussion in ways that will do some good for the most vulnerable.

And I write because my overarching message is not, "Listen to me!" My constant drumbeat-message throughout the book is that straight Christians cannot claim to love their LGBT neighbors if they do not pay compassionate attention to those neighbors--a message that, coming from another straight Christian, might inspire someone who doesn't pay attention to their LGBT neighbors (and so won't hear that message spoken by a sexual or gender minority) to look up from the pages of their Bibles and other books (including mine) and seek out LGBT voices.

I wrote this book because, tragically, we live in a world where it isn't obvious that love for someone starts with listening to them. We live in a world where too often Christians, who profess to live by an ethic of love, plug up their ears with Bible verses so they won't hear the anguished cries of the neighbors they are hurting (because hearing them might jar them loose from the certainty they need to sustain in order to continue to comfortably belong to their religious communities).

Because we live in such a world, I believe it can be helpful to have books that say, "Look up! Unplug your ears!" And we need some of those books to come from someone who isn't among those that the privileged are refusing to look at or listen to. A book by someone they are more likely to hear, but a book that points them to those they aren't hearing.

We live in a world where structural and ideological forces have invested some with privilege while marginalizing others. And because the privileged have power that the marginalized lack, they are capable of insulating themselves from the marginalized and their voices. But at least sometimes, allies enjoy access to the privileged that can help break down those insulating barriers. And I think that to the extent that they have such power, allies have a moral duty to use it.

I wish we didn't live in a world where that would be necessary, where some are so insulated from the marginalized others that it requires a voice from within their own circle of privilege to jar them from their insulation. But unfortunately I am convinced we do live in such a world. Despite all the advances that the LGBT community has made, we still do. And while it is the voices of the marginalized that will change that world, it is the duty of allies to say "listen!"

My book was born out of that sense of duty. My hope is that it will inspire someone, somewhere, to listen to their LGBT neighbors in a way they haven't before.

Bishop Oliveto, the United Methodists, and the Law of Love

A Personal Issue

On April 28, the Judicial Council of the United Methodist Church ruled that when the Western Jurisdiction of the UMC consecrated Rev. Karen Oliveto as a bishop, it violated church law. The law in question is an old one from the 1970's, one that precludes "self-avowed practicing homosexuals" from serving as church leaders in the UMC. Bishop Oliveto, in case you haven't heard, is in a same-sex marriage.

Although I am now a Lutheran, I was raised in the Methodist Church: a mid-sized suburban UMC congregation in upstate New York. I was confirmed there and was active with the UMYF--the United Methodist Youth Fellowship--throughout Junior High and High School. One of my fondest memories from that time was an extended canoe trip through the Adirondacks with the youth group and the pastors of the church. It was a week of connecting powerfully to God's creation, and experiencing its beauty and power through the Wesleyan lens our pastor preached from his own canoe, a paddle in hand. Among the experiences that have given me a vivid sense of God's presence, this one ranks among the most formative.

I say all of this because I want to explain why these events in the UMC are personal for me. Although I am today part of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, I was shaped by the UMC. When I picture a church, it is still that UMC church of my childhood that springs first to mind. And when I think about pastors who forged my faith in a God of love, one of the first to come to mind is Rev. Harrington, sitting in that canoe, his voice rolling along the river as he invited us all to take in the majesty of God's world.

Also, when I view the current turmoil in the UMC I recall the ELCA's struggles over these same matters, struggles I was personally involved with in numerous ways. I know first-hand what it feels like to be part of a church that's trying to find a way forward when it comes to inclusion of sexual minorities. At different times I was on both the losing and winning sides of the ELCA's fitful journey. Neither side was without its share of anguish. And so I look at the church of my childhood, and I share the pain.

Not Just an Issue

The controversy is so grave and difficult because it isn't about an "issue." It's about the fate of real people. It's about Bishop Oliveto but not just her. It's about Rev. Karen Dammann, who was put on trial and risked being defrocked for admitting to her congregation that she was in a committed relationship with a woman. It's about Rev. Jimmy Creech, who was defrocked for performing same-sex union ceremonies for members of his congregation. Closer to home, it's about Oklahoma pastor Kathleen McCallie, a friend of my wife who loved her work as a UMC minister but who faced the same choice as Creech, and in anguish chose to follow her conscience and so be expelled from the church and ministry she loved.

This is not an "issue" that members of the UMC can just agree to disagree about and then worship together amidst their differences. Why not? Because this is about the actual fate of real people within the worship life of the church. It is about who gets to perform which roles in worship. It is about which couples can get married in a church service, which ones can sit together in the pews without being labeled as sinners for it. It is about who can show up with their partners at an adult Sunday School class about building stronger marriages, and who will be told, "Your marriage should be voided, not made stronger, because your love for each other is a sin and the meaning and richness you find in life partnership is an abomination."

Love and Same-Sex Marriage

It's because of the persistent recurrence of cases like Bishop Oliveto's, cases that continue to cause so much turmoil and pain, that I felt compelled to write my forthcoming book on same-sex marriage and Christian love, The Triumph of Love. I cannot, in a blog post, do justice to all of the arguments in that book. But I want to sketch out a few of them here. In that book I argue that, if we want to love our gay and lesbian brothers and sisters, we should apply to them the same model of sexual restraint that has served heterosexuals through history: all of us should be urged to express our sexuality within the bonds of marriage.

Marriage, at its best, becomes a crucible for learning faithful love over a lifetime. Marriage is not just a source of joy but a source of meaning and growth in love. To withhold that from gays and lesbians, most of whom are as ill-equipped for life-long celibacy as their heterosexual peers, has substantial costs for their welfare.

But the cost goes deeper than simply losing out on something. The Christian tradition has long held that all same-sex intimacy, even in marriage, is a sin. If you think this, you think Christian communities should be structured accordingly. You think gays and lesbians should grow up being taught that their sexuality is fundamentally broken, that their intimate partnerships are an affront to God no matter how faithful and virtuous and life-enriching they might be. You think gays and lesbians should be systematically excluded from participation in the most foundational social and cultural unit. Not only are they forced to live their lives without the kind of love and companionship and lessons in Christian love that marriage brings. They are taught that, in a fundamental sense, there is not a place for them.

Because Christian communities have long been built around these assumptions, many gays and lesbians have been born and raised under these conditions. And so we know what it is like for them if we listen compassionately to their stories. I have done such listening, as have many other Christians who are, like me, progressive on this question. Like many others, I have learned some important lessons from that listening, lessons underscored by the corpses of those driven to suicidal despair by the conviction that they will never be acceptable in the eyes of God unless they close themselves off to their most intense yearnings for love and closeness. Countless witnesses reinforce a shattering message: traditional teachings on homosexuality can be soul-crushing for the sexual minorities who grow up in communities that teach it. While some break away, others just break.

Of course, much has changed in recent years. There are growing pockets of acceptance. Many sexual minorities have found peace and a place at the table within Christian communities. Instead of having to choose between their faith and their sexual/romantic selves--or having to live the lie of the closet--many are finding places where they can have what heterosexuals take for granted: the integration of Christian faith with their human longing for sexual intimacy and loving partnership.

To believe that all homosexual sex is sinful is to believe that such opportunities should be withdrawn and the closet door slammed shut. But that doesn't sound much like love to me.

Burying Talents

The current policies of the UMC perpetuate the marginalization of gays and lesbians. But they also diminish the church community itself. This is apparent in the current case of Bishop Oliveto.

In a statement earlier in the week, Bishop Oliveto made an interesting observation about the hearing that could decide her future as a UMC bishop: "What is fascinating about today’s hearing is that no one questioned the gifts and graces I possess for ordained ministry and specifically for the episcopacy. And no one has looked at my work and said my abilities for this task are lacking."

No one questioned this for the simple reason that her abilities aren't lacking. Had she been in a heterosexual marriage rather than a same-sex one, no one would have questioned her consecration. She felt called to the ministry. She felt called to the episcopacy. And according to friends of mine who are part of the Western Jurisdiction and who have met her, she is a person of grace, poise, wisdom, and competence.

When a class of people are excluded from church leadership even though they have the requisite gifts and have experienced a call, it is as if they are being forced to bury their talents. When Christ tells His parable of the talents, He concludes it by chastising the servant who chooses to bury the talent given him by his master. But Rev. Karen Oliveto chose to use her talents, not to bury them. She chose to use them on behalf of the UMC. The Western Jurisdiction chose to let her do so. If the UMC as a whole forces her out of the episcopacy--and the recent ruling is a clear step in that direction--then it is the UMC that is burying Oliveto's talents, and hence the UMC that must face Christ's censure.

Law and Obedience

The law of the UMC is plain enough, and the Judicial Council was probably right that according to that law, what the Western Jurisdiction did was unlawful. But this policy is the law of a human institution, and there is a higher law than that. The decision of the Western Jurisdiction to consecrate Bishop Oliveto despite church law was a case of civil disobedience. The purpose of civil disobedience is not to defy the rule of law. Its purpose, rather, is to seek to change an unjust human law based on a deeper obedience to a higher law.

Oliveto's consecration expressed Christian deference to a divine calling, one not beholden to the laws of a human institution. More importantly, it expressed allegiance to the law of love, the law that Christ lifted up as our most fundamental commandment.

Not everyone agrees, of course, that God would have the audacity to call a married lesbian to the episcopacy. Not everyone agrees that love for our gay and lesbian neighbors requires us to abandon the old teachings that have for so long been a source of so much suffering. But motives matter--and the motive in this case was not disdain for the rule of law but a sense of faithfulness to a higher law. One might disagree about what that higher law requires of us, but such disagreement does not change the motives involved.

Love Admidst Disagreement

But this brings me to the final point. The perspective I've articulated is hardly uncontroversial. I can already hear the clamoring questions: Doesn't it ignore what the Bible says? What about Church Tradition and Natural Law arguments? Isn't it clear from these things that God really does prohibit same-sex romantic love? And doesn't it follow from this that someone who makes a marital commitment to such love is making a commitment to sin? And isn't a commitment to sin incompatible with church leadership?

That is the conservative stance. I find it wholly unpersuasive, for reasons I explore in depth in my book. But I can't reproduce my entire book in a blog post, so let me limit myself to two points here.

First, the argument I've sketched out here, which challenges the conservative stance, isn't coming from secular culture but from the urgings of the law of love and my understanding of what that law requires. This is a Christian case for overturning the UMC's policies on homosexuality and same-sex marriage. Even if you think that case is defeated by biblical arguments, it doesn't mean there is no case--a case that, if we trust what Jesus had to say, is rooted in nothing less than the most important commandment of all.

The second point is this: While defenders of the conservative view are sometimes moved by ugly motives such as homophobia, many are moved by sincere belief. Many are pained by the suffering of their LGBT neighbors and grieve the tragic frequency of gay suicide, but they have been convinced that the condemnation of homosexuality is God's word and that the solution to LGBT suffering must be found in something other than opening the door to same-sex marriage.

This is as true in the UMC as it is in other denominations. Those who defend the UMC's ongoing marginalization of LGBT Methodists cannot simply be dismissed as homophobes. Those who celebrate the Oliveto ruling are not all motivated by hate.

Perhaps they haven't heard, as I have, the litany of anguishing life stories, tales of suffering wrought by anti-LGBT policies of exclusion. If so, we need to invite them to hear those stories.

Perhaps they've listened to a handful of LGBT Christians who tell a comforting tale of becoming ex-gay (comforting, at least, if you don't want to find yourself standing opposed to the dominant teachings of your community and its understanding of the Bible). If so, we should invite them to consider those stories in a broader context that includes the many stories of hopeless efforts to "change," often followed by years of living a lie, a pretense of healing, and stumbling into unwise and ultimately tragic heterosexual marriages in a desperate effort to belong.

Perhaps they've been immersed in a theology whose views about the Bible make it seem as if there is no choice but to stand fast to the view that homosexuality is sinful, no matter what gays and lesbians may say about the alienation and despair that this inspires. There are those who think they would betray the very word of God if they shifted their stance, if they did anything short of continuing to endorse existing policies. And it doesn't matter how many talents get buried. It doesn't matter how many gays and lesbians are cast to the margins. The Bible is clear.

If this is what they think, we should dig into our understanding of what the Bible is and what it says. We should think together about the Bible's history, its context, the languages of the ancient authors, and the alternative ways of understanding how the Bible is related to the will and word of God. We should think together about which Christian approaches do the most to honor the incarnating, loving, sacrificing, redeeming God to whom the Bible testifies.

Those who stand witness to just how crushing LGBT marginalization has been must rise up in loving defense of the victims. Hearing what we have heard and believing what we believe, it would be unloving for us to do anything else. At the same time, we must strive to reach out in love to those who are sincerely convinced that God calls them to perpetuate policies of exclusion. Anger can be fitting, because there is such a thing as angry love. Painful honesty about the horrific consequences of their beliefs--honesty that pulls no punches in the name of "niceness"--can be appropriate, because love demands truth.

But we cannot descend into hate. We cannot resort to violence--either outward violence or verbal abuse or spiritual violation. We must remain open to fellowship when the terms of fellowship don't require complicity in perpetuating harm.

And if we wade into the fray--if we really wrestle with the conflicts and controversies--it can become very hard to sustain a spirit of love towards those we think are complicit in perpetuating harmful policies (or those we think are betraying the Word of God).

And so we need to open ourselves up to the grace that is beyond us, the transforming power of a divine love that can persist where merely human will must fail.

Triumph of Love, Excerpt #3: The Effects of Categorically Condemning Homosexuality

For Election Day, instead of a political post, I offer the third excerpt from my forthcoming book on same-sex marriage and the Christian love ethic. This excerpt offers a kind of summary of what the book has argued so far, in anticipation of tackling scriptural and natural law arguments for the conservative view. It thus functions well as a short, stand-alone piece (although it does not address all the details that came before or address the various objections that come later in the book). Enjoy!

I’ve tried to paint a picture of what it’s like for gays and lesbians to live in societies that deny them access to legal marriage and condemn every expression of their sexuality. Although Western societies have been moving fitfully away from this model of exclusion, this is the kind of society conservative Christians think gays and lesbians should live in. And because so many gays and lesbians have grown up in such a society, we know what it’s like for them.

My argument so far has been that by endorsing such a society, conservative Christians endorse something that harms their gay and lesbian neighbors. In such a society, gays and lesbians learn from a young age that they’ll never be equal and fully accepted members of their community. Most who try to change their intimate feelings fail, but in the process some trap themselves and their spouses in miserable heterosexual marriages they hoped would “fix” them. If they do form a loving partnership, society will condemn it. Every effort to nurture the bonds of love will be seen as evidence of their commitment to sin. While their straight friends can hope to fall in love and have their partnerships celebrated and supported by the wider community, the best sexual minorities can hope for is to find such support in a marginalized subculture while erecting walls of secrecy and isolation from those who would call their love a sin.

Some internalize the message that their deepest impulse towards love and intimacy is an affront to God. And when promises of change prove empty, they come to see that impulse as a sign that their very nature is a perversion, a blight on the world. Others, struggling to live in self-denial, cling to the praise of the very Christian conservatives who deny them what so enriches their heterosexual peers—a pattern reminiscent of abused children living for intermittent scraps of parental affection. As the only real payoff for their sacrifice, they wear the mantle of “costly discipleship” so tightly they hardly notice it costs them their ability to focus on discipleship.

Some, unable to suppress their deep instinct for sexual and romantic intimacy, pursue it in contexts where normal, healthy constraints on sexuality are absent. Since their sexuality as a whole is condemned, they make no fine-tuned distinctions between appropriate and inappropriate expressions. Loving monogamy becomes no better than casual sex—except that the latter can be explained away as momentary weakness rather than commitment to sin. In such a world, we shouldn’t be surprised when closeted pastors and politicians are caught with their pants down in pathetically tawdry sex scandals.

Other minorities, such as blacks and Jews, are raised by families like them in the ways that mark them off for marginalization. They have the opportunity from childhood to know solidarity with others who are similarly marginalized. Their homes and religious communities offer coping skills and at least some measure of refuge from society’s stigmatization.

But sexual minorities routinely grow up in profound isolation. Fearing rejection even from their own families and churches (at least if they admit who they are), they retreat into the closet—a metaphor for hiding one’s true self from the world and living a pretense. And because intimacy is about sharing oneself with others, the closet impedes intimacy across relationships—with parents, siblings, coworkers, friends, teachers and pastors. Deprived of one kind of intimacy by the categorical condemnation of homosexuality, the closet takes away the rest. Sometimes the isolation and rejection can be almost too much to bear, and all it takes is a final gesture of denunciation or scorn to spark an act of self-obliteration.

Despite all of this, many gays and lesbians make their way to a subculture that accepts them. They shake off self-loathing and the condemnation of their sexuality, and they come to see faithful partnerships as having a worth that other expressions of their sexuality lack. They fall in love, form marriage-like partnerships, and work to sustain them despite a society that not only withholds the social supports and accountability marriage provides but can be overtly hostile. Many have the devotion to do that work, and with the security of those relationships and a gay subculture that steps in to partially fill the gap, many escape suicidal loneliness.

But this bulwark against despair is something conservatives think they ought to be deprived of. Admittedly, many are sincere about trying to make alternative support systems available: ex-gay communities and spiritual friendship networks that aim to help those without the gift of celibacy to endure a life of ongoing suppression of their sexuality. But these alternatives lack what Christian marriage has: the multiple-level intimacy in which physical love is integrated with other forms of closeness in a way that forms a deeper and more holistic connection between embodied spirits than is possible without that physical dimension. And because they lack a framework for expressing sexuality that lifts sexuality out of the realm of animal lust and into a space of human meaning, these alternatives set up those gays and lesbians who lack the gift of celibacy not only for failure, but for failure of a particularly debasing kind: momentary sexual relief in meaningless encounters. As we have seen, such failure can lead to genital-slashing self-loathing.

What conservatives on this issue cannot consistently support is the bulwark against despair that does the most good: a community that supports and celebrates expressions of a homosexual orientation within the context of enduring monogamous love. Conservatives can’t consistently say that homosexuality is always a sin and yet be glad there’s a subculture where despairing gays and lesbians are embraced for who they are and encouraged to live out their sexuality with a self-affirming identity. They can’t consistently say that homosexuality is always a sin and yet be happy for their gay and lesbian neighbors who form life-enriching same-sex relationships. To think homosexuality is always a sin is, on pain of inconsistency, to think there should be no such subculture and no such relationships.

Suppose someone said something like the following about your most intimate partnership: “No matter how much it enriches your life and no matter how hard you have worked to nurture love and intimacy within it, it would be better if your relationship ceased to exist.” And then suppose they follow it up with something like this: “But even though I think this relationship that means so much to you is a moral blight on the world, I still love you.”

Wouldn’t your natural response be to say, “No, you don’t”?

The portrait I’m painting doesn’t look like a society that loves the gays and lesbians in its midst. The practical implications of condemning homosexuality, which come to vivid life when we listen compassionately to our gay and lesbian neighbors, are hard to reconcile with the Christian command to love our neighbors, including our gay and lesbian ones, as ourselves.

Triumph of Love Excerpt #2: Loving the Sinner but Hating the Sin

Posted below is the second of my promised excerpts from my work-in-progress, Triumph of Love: Same-Sex Marriage and the Christian Love Ethic. This is the introductory section of a chapter exploring the uses and misuses of the "love the sinner but hate the sin" mantra. Enjoy!

The story is common enough. Joe and Mary are walking out of a college classroom where the topic of homosexuality just came up. Joe, a conservative Christian convinced that all homosexual sex is sinful, expressed this conviction during the class discussion. Mary, a lesbian, isn’t quite ready to let that go. She’s tired of staying quiet.

“You really think I should break up with my girlfriend,” she says, “even though we love each other?”

“The Bible says it’s wrong. I can’t go against that.”

“But what about love your neighbor as yourself? Isn’t that in the Bible, too? You really think it’s loving to break apart people who love each other?”

“I’m not breaking you apart. You’ve got to decide to do that for yourself.”

“But you think we ought to break up. You would encourage us to break up.”

“That’s what God says.”

“You really know what God says? How arrogant can you be!”

“I…it’s in the Bible. I don’t have anything against you or your girlfriend, but the Bible is clear. What you’re doing is a sin, and I can’t condone sin.”

“This is the most meaningful relationship of my life. Anyone who knows me knows what ending it would do…it would be…” She falls silent, seething with frustration. She doesn’t know how to say it. He seems to her like a wall of righteousness. She gropes for words: “If you think the world would be improved by Katy and me breaking up, what you really think is that the world would be better if both Katy and I lost the most meaningful, beautiful, loving relationship either of us has ever known. You think the world would be a better place if this beautiful thing were destroyed, if it were taken away from us, if both of us were left heartbroken. How is that love? How can you possibly claim to love me and Katy if that’s what you think should happen? You think it would be loving to tell a happily married couple they should break up, that it would be wrong for them to grow old together? You think it would be loving to call what they have an abomination?”

“I didn’t use that word.”

“You didn’t have to.”

“But it’s not the same thing. A married couple—”

“It is the same thing!”

“It’s not! One’s a sin and the other isn’t!”

“I’m telling you that Katy and I have something beautiful together, and wanting to tear us apart is wanting to destroy something that makes our lives better. That’s not love.”

“I don’t want to tear you apart. That’s not what I’m saying.”

“You don’t? So you think it is fine for us to stay together?”

“No! I’m saying I’m supposed to love the sinner while hating the sin.”

“That’s a f**king copout!” she shouts. “If you hate my relationship enough to insist that it should end, then you don’t love me and you don’t love Katy. You can’t call what we have a sin and still love us. That’s bulls**t!”

Mary storms away. Joe stands there, shaking a little in the aftermath of her fury.

So is Joe right that he can love Mary while condemning as sin her most intimate relationship? Is Mary right that to hate her relationship is incompatible with loving her?

The question is important. Setting aside extremists like Fred Phelps with his “God Hates Fags” signs, conservative Christians typically agree that we ought to love our gay and lesbian neighbors as ourselves—in other words, that the Christian call to love one another includes sexual minorities. But they typically hold that such love is fully compatible with condemning homosexuality—because we can “love the sinner but hate the sin.”

For many of my gay and lesbian acquaintances, they’ve heard this phrase so much it has become an emotional trigger. They react as if it were nothing but a smokescreen for perpetuating hateful practices and policies, a false promise of love to make the reality of hate more palatable (that is, more palatable to the agents of hate and third-party observers, not to the victims).

In a recent Tulsa World op-ed, Mike Jones expresses just this sort of cynicism. He concedes that the “love the sinner, hate the sin” phrase could be used in beneficial ways. “But what can be a helpful, even comforting phrase, under the right circumstances,” he says, “has been hijacked by those whose purpose is to hand down judgments . . . ” And instead of being a general remark about sin and sinners, it has acquired a focus. In Jones’s experience, the phrase “is used now almost exclusively for those who disapprove of the lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender community.”

The widespread LGBT suspicion of the phrase doesn’t spring out of nowhere. James Dobson, for example, repeatedly says that we should love our gay and lesbian neighbors as ourselves. The following statement is typical:

Christians have a scriptural mandate to love and care for all the people of the world. Even those who are living in immoral circumstances are entitled to be treated with dignity and respect. There is no place for hatred, hurtful jokes, or other forms of rejection toward those who are gay.

But as we’ve already seen, Dobson has persistently used rhetoric that feeds anti-gay ideologies of division, including claims that homosexuals are a threat to children. Dobson founded the Family Research Council and remains closely tied to it—the same Family Research Council that published the slanderous pamphlet we looked at in the last chapter, in which homosexuality was falsely linked to pedophilia through egregious misrepresentation of the research.

When such public figures pay lip service to loving gays and lesbians at the same time that they pursue and supporting unloving practices, it is not at all surprising that when gays and lesbians hear “love the sinner but hate the sin,” they find it a kind of disingenuous double-speak that is mostly about making hateful practices tolerable to the wider public by wrapping it up loving words.

But in my experience, most individual Christians who talk about loving the sinner while hating the sin are sincere. There was a time when I used the phrase myself in relation to my gay and lesbian neighbors—and I was earnest enough when I did so. My problem wasn’t that I didn’t mean it. My problem was that I didn’t wrestle with what it means to show love for gays and lesbians. The phrase became a mantra that I could fall back on to avoid confronting a real difficulty—the difficulty highlighted in the exchange between Joe and Mary. What is involved in believing that homosexuality is a sin—that is, really believing it, acting as if it were true? And what is involved in really loving my gay and lesbian neighbors? And are these things compatible?

There is a tension here, and conservative Christians who invoke the “love the sinner, hate the sin” dictum are often dodging that tension. The dictum becomes an easy conversation-stopper, a way to hide from challenging questions about what it means to show love. Gays and lesbians have every right to complain when Christians do that.

Nevertheless, I think the dictum is an indispensable part of the Christian moral life. No Christian who seeks to live by the ethic of love can deny that we must love sinners while hating sin. The problem doesn’t lie with the dictum itself, but with how it is invoked and with the challenge of figuring out what it implies.

Triumph of Love Excerpt #1: The place of emotions in loving debate

As promised, I start this week sharing excepts from my forthcoming book, Triumph of Love: Same-Sex Marriage and the Christian Love Ethic. For the first excerpt, I've chosen a passage from the last chapter of the book, in which I move away from the question of what the love ethic demands with respect to our gay and lesbian neighbors and focus on how sincere people who disagree on these matters can pursue their disagreements in a spirit of love.

Let me offer just a few words of context. I reject the notion that any of us should simply "agree to disagree" when the actual fate of people we are called to love is at stake. If we're convinced we have an important truth to share, we do no one a favor by hiding it or obscuring it in an effort to be nice. What love calls for is honest debate that avoid psychological manipulation and seeks instead to illuminate truth. We are called to share why we believe in ways that may move others if our reasons are as compelling as we think they are, and may expose the weaknesses in our thinking when they're not as compelling as we think.

One question that arises in this context is the place of emotions and emotional appeals in loving debates. After exploring an example of an illicit appeal to disgust (an example I addressed a few years back in this blog entry), I move to a broader discussion of the place of emotions in loving discourse and debate. Without further ado, the excerpt:

Appeals to misleading emotions are one of the most potent forms of improper manipulation, and the appeal to disgust is just an example. Consider a slightly more complex case involving shame, fear of ridicule, and the desire for belonging. Suppose I’m having a conversation with several people, talking about my gay best friend, and I notice that one member of the group—call her Jane—starts to shift uncomfortably. She finally asks how I deal with the biblical passages that condemn homosexuality. Imagine that I respond with something like the following: “You don’t actually think homosexuality is wrong, do you? I mean, that’s ridiculous! This is the twenty-first century. You’re smarter than that, right?” 

Such a comment is designed to manipulate Jane with the fear of appearing a fool. Instead of inviting an open sharing of perspectives, it shuts down such sharing. A hint of flattery—“you look smarter than the kind of person who would think that”—is really a basis for invoking the specter of public shame. More often than not, the person most influenced by such a tactic may not be Jane, but the fence-sitting bystander—let’s call him Joe—who hasn’t thought much about the topic but sincerely longs to belong. The more he witnesses those with another view being shamed and silenced, the more he gravitates to the socially safest choice. At its worst this strategy can generate an arms-race of shame, in which each side of the debate escalates the social costs of rejecting their view in order to ensure that siding with them represent the socially safest choice. The winner of such an arms race has done nothing to illuminate truth.

While invoking misleading emotional responses for persuasive purposes is inimical to debating issues in a spirit of love, this does not mean that our discussions and debates should be divorced from our feelings. Not every emotion is an irrelevant emotion. 

Sometimes a compelling story generates a strong emotional response, and the reason is because the story has stimulated our capacity for empathy. We are suddenly in the shoes of another person, feeling what it’s like to be them. Our eyes tear up because we vicariously feel their suffering. We smile because we suddenly understand their joy as if it were our own. 

That kind of emotional resonance is crucial for loving our neighbors as ourselves, because it gives genuine insight. We can’t make wise decisions about how to love our neighbors if we can’t empathize with how they feel, if we can’t discern the truth about what it is like to be in their situation. 

Sometimes, in disagreements and debates, what we have to offer is a way of looking at an issue that invites and encourages this sort of empathy, thereby eliciting an emotional response. That emotional response is hardly irrelevant, because it is part of the insight into truth. If I didn’t feel some vicarious anguish at the story of a mother who can’t produce enough milk to feed her baby, that means I’m not seeing the truth about her situation. 

Likewise, there are some emotional responses to the experiences of others—compassion for those who suffer, anger at injustice—whose absence betrays a failure to appreciate what is going on. While our emotions are tricky, there is a strong intellectual tradition that sees them as having cognitive content: emotions are about something. Anger, for example, is a response to a perceived wrong. If injustice does not anger us, if it’s just some fact about the world that our intellect tells us is wrong, then a part of us has failed to see that it’s wrong. Our emotional selves have become blinded to the injustice, and so we aren’t discerning the injustice with our whole selves. 

In discussion or debate, part of our aim might be to awaken others’ emotional selves to a truth they have failed to see (even if their intellects have discerned it). In other words, we might not limit ourselves to making an intellectually dispassionate case that something is unjust. We might go further, looking for an analogy or image or narrative that helps to expose the outrageousness of the injustice. This is not an appeal to an irrelevant emotion, but rather a way of extending the intellectual argument beyond the merely academic, theoretical level. It’s a way of helping the heart, and not just the mind, to see. 

But because the emotions can be misled—because some rhetoricians have the power to paint something as outrageous even when no wrong has been done—it is best to wed such emotion-evoking arguments to more intellectual ones, to argue in a way that awakens the heart along with the mind, as opposed to awakening the heart alone (while, perhaps, the mind is kept deliberately asleep so the heart can be more easily led astray). 

Christian love, whatever else it is, is emotional. To love our neighbors as ourselves is to feel for them and to feel with them. Any strategy of debate and argument that is cut off from our emotions is therefore at odds with the very nature of Christian love. But truth-oriented arguments that extend to our emotional selves are not the same as manipulative ones that evoke emotions in order to confuse and obscure and misdirect. Love calls for the former, and rules out the latter.

Coming Soon: Triumph of Love Excerpts!

Some of you may have noticed that my blogging dropped off this spring and vanished entirely over the summer. There is a reason for this: I've been pouring all my writing energies into finishing my newest book, Triumph of Love: Same-Sex Marriage and the Christian Love Ethic, in an effort to beat the December contract deadline.

The good news is that I am now working on the final chapter of the first draft, and with my sabbatical this semester I have no worries about being able to revise the whole manuscript in time, so long as I stay focused. The bad news is that I still want to resist blogging about current topics so I can be sure to meet my deadline. This is probably a good thing, since the current election season would likely inspire posts that are nothing but expressions of incredulity.

However...

There is no reason why I can't, over the next few months, post a few choice excerpts from my work-in-progress. Look for the first one next week.

I post these for two self-serving reasons. First, to generate some interest in the forthcoming book. Second, to elicit critical feedback.

Just a word about that second aim. I don't take all critical feedback seriously, because I don't find all critical feedback helpful. Some of it doesn't even qualify as critical feedback. I generally find feedback of the following sort unhelpful: it commits formal or informal fallacies; it does little more than accuse me of being a heretic; it is an exercise in creative name-calling instead of a critical engagement with the substance of what I have posted; it expresses righteous indignation over my utter failure to consider argument X (which, while I don't address it in the excerpt, I address elsewhere in the book).

Of course, with respect to the last issue, you can't know whether I consider argument X elsewhere in the book or not. So you should feel free to point out that argument X is relevant to issues raised in the excerpt. I'm likely to be quite receptive if you use something like the following form: "This excerpt made me think of argument X, which I think is relevant for reasons R1 and R2. Do you address that argument in the book?" I just get irritated when you use something like the following form: "What an idiot you are for failing to consider argument X! And to think you call yourself a philosopher!" If you do use the latter form, it is helpful to include a winky-face emoji at the end.

(That said, if I really did miss arguments that strikes me as important, I will likely look up scholarly articulations of them and find ways to work them into the manuscript even if you direct me to them in an a$$#0l-ey way.)

If you do feel motivated to offer serious feedback that engages with the substance of what I argue in a posted excerpt, I will be appreciative. I may not, however, take the time to engage in the kind of back-and-forth discussion that I pursue when I have more time. My energies will be directed primarily towards revising the manuscript, and I know from experience that the discussion section of a blog post can be a serious time-suck if I start responding to comments there. So my engagement may be minimal, although you may find that other readers of the blog are eager to engage.

Finally, my main aim with posting excerpts is to generate some interest and give those who are already interested a foretaste of what's to come. I have volunteer readers for the manuscript who are likely to offer far more substantive and authoritative feedback than what I can get from those who happen to read a few pages out of context. But if you surprise me, it's not totally inconceivable that the acknowledgments section of the book might include a sentence like this: "Thanks also to the various commenters on my blog, some of whom offered feedback on early excerpts that ranged from actually helpful to only moderately perplexing."

I know, I know. Heady stuff.

What Should Christians think about Today's Historic SCOTUS Decision?

Actually, I don't intend to answer that question here. I can't. To do that, I'd need to write a book--well, probably more than one. (And I intend to.)

What I can do here is warn against certain sweeping claims about what Christians should think. More precisely, I want to warn against an all-too-common practice among Christians today when it comes to homosexuality and same-sex marriage: The tendency to think that all Christians, to be truly Christian on this matter, must agree with us.

First, an obvious point: While Christianity might have something to say about who we should and shouldn't have sex with, it isn't a religion about who we should and shouldn't have sex with. Christianity is about who God is and what God has done, who Christ is and what Christ did. Christians are followers of Jesus. And Jesus said nothing about gay sex.

The Christian debate about homosexuality and same-sex marriage is not a debate about the heart of the faith.

Beyond this obvious point, Christians need to move past false or overgeneralized claims about the motives of their Christian opponents.

Conservatives have a tendency to portray Christians who are progressive on this issue as sell-outs to secular culture. In doing so, they ignore the fact that Jesus' command to love our neighbors as ourselves sits at the heart of progressive Christian arguments on this issue.

By contrast, I have liberal Christian friends who dismiss conservatives on this issue as ignoring both Christ's command that we love our neighbors as ourselves and Christ's call not to judge, lest we be judged ourselves. But in offering such a sweeping assessment, they ignore my Christian friends who earnestly wish they could support the intimate relationships of their gay friends, who are pained by what they see as a divine requirement to condemn those relationships--who wish it were otherwise, but who can't see another way to interpret what they take to be God's word.

Let me be clear: There are plenty of conservative Christians who are not motivated by love for their gay and lesbian neighbors. There are plenty who invoke the slogan "Love the neighbor but hate the sin" without paying any attention to what comes before the "but". There are plenty of Fred Phelpses in the world. Many are just less honest and open about their bigotry.

But this doesn't mean that all conservatives on this issue are homophobic in their hearts. It doesn't mean that every conservative is insincere about the desire to love their gay and lesbian neighbors.

I believe, and have argued, that their belief about homosexuality operates as an impediment to their expressing that love properly--that they are unwittingly feeding their gay and lesbian neighbors poison based on the false belief that it is medicine. But I also believe that these Christians would weep and repent were they to realize that the doctrines informing their relationships with gays and lesbians really are as soul-crushing and anti-Evangelical as my experience with gay and lesbian friends teaches me they are.

Where I disagree with these Christians isn't at the level of their intentions and their sincerity. And while I take today's ruling to be a cause for celebration, I don't think every Christian who believes otherwise is therefore a bad Christian. I think they're mistaken, but that doesn't mean they aren't striving to live by the law of love as best they can.

Likewise, let me be clear that there are surely plenty of progressive Christians who haven't wrestled deeply with the issue of same-sex intimacy in the light of their Christian commitments and values, who are just going with the flow, following the prevailing trends. But to treat such motives as the core of the progressive Christian stance is to ignore or fundamentally misunderstand what progressive have been arguing for years.

The birthplace of progressive Christian support for same-sex marriage isn't found in secular culture. I would argue--and in fact have argued--that the causation moves in the opposite direction: Secular culture has come to see same-sex relationships differently because the spirit of agapic love has taken root there.

Gays and lesbians are not only a minority, but an easy out-group to scapegoat and marginalize. If you're straight, then a prohibition on gay sex is no prohibition at all. Hence, such a prohibition has, for the majority, the effect of offering easy righteousness. "I can feel morally superior without expending any effort, because whatever I do at least I'm not one of those fa**ots."

If there's a reason why our broader culture has moved away from this, it isn't because of an anything-goes secular permissiveness that would allow the heterosexual majority the moral freedom to have sex with people they have absolutely no desire or inclination to have sex with. It's because of empathy. It's because, over the last forty years, gays and lesbians have been really heard for the first time in history. People have put themselves in their shoes. They have asked themselves the question at the heart of the Golden Rule: What would I want done to me, if I were in their place?

Christian reformers on this issue argue that when we really pay attention to our gay and lesbian neighbors, it becomes increasingly clear that "How do we love the sinner while hating the sin?" is the wrong question.. The right question is this: What can we take to be a sin while still loving our neighbors as we should.

And loving attention to our gay and lesbian neighbors teaches us that calling all same-sex intimacy a sin is doing harm to them, the kind of real harm that love must stand against. Contestable biblical interpretations and natural law arguments must give way before what loving attention teaches, or we end up loving our own beliefs more than we love our neighbors.

This progressive view isn't about selling out to secular culture. It's about trying to live by Christ's command to love our neighbors as ourselves.

Christians may disagree with my take on these issues, just as I disagree with them. But these lines of disagreement can't and shouldn't be treated as the dividing line between real Christians and sell-outs, or between real Christians and homophobic bigots wearing the cloak of Christian righteousness to justify their prejudice.

All Christians should strive to love their gay and lesbian neighbors as themselves, and should wrestle sincerely with what that call to love demands. All Christians should strive to rise above the whims and vagaries of secular culture, informing their life and values in relation to God, not Hollywood.

But there are Christians celebrating today's SCOTUS decision who embrace both of these things. There are Christians bemoaning it who embrace both. Recognizing these facts should be a starting point for any serious attempt to decide what Christians should believe about today's historic decision.

If we don't start there, we will model pugnacity and prejudice instead of Christian love.

Capital Punishment and the Christian Conscience

A couple of weeks ago, the ethics of capital punishment was pushed into the national spotlight by a botched execution here in Oklahoma. In the aftermath, here's something I noticed: When the horrific nature of the convict's death was mentioned, people were quick to point out the even more horrific nature of the crime.

Behind that move lies the retributive idea that it's intrinsically good to inflict suffering on wrongdoers, suffering that's proportionate to their offense.

But this is one idea that Jesus consistently challenged. As Christians--followers of Jesus--think about the death penalty, they would do well to ask, "Who would Jesus execute?" And although Jesus was Himself put to death by the state, He was never in a position to order an execution. So evidence of what Jesus would have done has to be more indirect.

Here, then, are some things for Christians to think about as they wrestle with the ethics of the death penalty:

The Transforming Power of Grace Exemplified: The Case of Antoinette Tuff

A few months ago I offered the following remarks in a blog post, in answer to what Christians should think of Wayne LaPierre's idea that a good guy with a gun is the only thing that can stop a bad guy with one:

If there’s a common theme in Jesus’ ministry and message, it’s about a different way of responding to evil, to injustice, to violence, than the traditional human response of fighting fire with fire. Jesus’ life and death were a testament to this divine Third Way—a way that refuses to identify sin with sinners, evil with evil-doers, that insists on the possibility of redemption and seeks to transform a violent situation not by a final lethal stroke of violence, but by a creative act of love—even, if necessary, love that suffers unto death.  

As a response to evil, there’s an unbridgeable gulf between picking up a cross and picking up a gun.

Secular vs. Religious Values: Reflecting on the Meaning of the Election

In her recent reflection on the results of Tuesday's election, writer and blogger Greta Christina touted the outcome as a "Victory of Secular Values."

To support this perspective she focused on several outcomes in particular: The success of marriage equality initiatives--and the defeat or an anti-same-sex marriage amendent in Minnesota; the election of the first openly gay or lesbian senator; the success of marijuana-legalization initiatives; the sound trumping of misogynistic rape-apologizing candidates; the defeat of a Florida amendment that would have allowed taxpayer money to support churches; and the failure of the Republican effort to win votes by demonizing birth control (and hence sex-for-pleasure).

As Greta Christina sees it, "the Republican Party tried to win, in large part, through religious fear-mongering about gays and drugs and sex and abortion and women who don’t know their place," and the effort failed big-time. Thus, she concludes, "This election was, to a great extent, a referendum on secular values versus the values of the theocratic religious right — and secular values won."

Now in casting the outcome of the election in these terms, Christina is in danger of playing into the very same narrative that is fueling the religious right in this country. The narrative, in short, is that our nation and the world confronts a conflict between the forces of faith and the forces of secularism, and any victory for the latter is a defeat for the people of God. We find elements of this narrative starkly displayed in Todd Akin's concession speech, when he says "that life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness come from almighty God not almighty government." We find it in those persistent religious-right warnings of the dire consequences of rejecting "God's values" (which, surprisingly, seem to be largely about sex and gender relationships) in favor of the secular ones touted by political liberals.

Now it's not uncommon to find that some of the more polarized atheists have the same basic assumptions about the relationship between the secular and the sacred that are rampant among those in the religious right. Dawkins and Ken Hamm agree that science and religion are fundamentally opposed--what they disagree about is which needs to go. But it is just this sort of polarization, this either/or division, that I think warrants serious critical scrutiny.

To be fair, Greta Christina frames her view as a victory of secular values over those of the "theocratic religious right," not over religion in more general terms. What was defeated was "religious fear-mongering." But she makes no mention of any other form of religion--a religion not rooted in fear--that might also declare victory in Tuesday's election. And this means some important points get missed. Two in particular are in danger of being overlooked, I think, unless they're made explicit.

First, and most obviously, this week's election was not merely a victory (on many fronts, at least) for secular values over the values of the religious right. It was also, on many fronts, a victory of progressive religious values over the values of the religious right. When I reflect on the states that voted for marriage equality, and on the evidence of the waning power of the prejudices that would have prevented an openly lesbian woman from gaining a senate seat, what I see are trends in America fully harmonious with the love ethic I and other religious progressives discover in the life and ministry of Jesus--an ethic that stands with the marginalized and oppressed and against the sort of legalism that's invoked to exclude, to create in-groups and out-groups, us and them.

Within Christianity today there is a struggle among rival ethical understandings, and homosexuality has become a central battleground. Any quick gloss on the nature of this struggle would oversimplify it, but one thing is clear: While many on the religious right want very much to paint progressive Christian opponents of the traditional condemnation of homosexuality as sell-outs to secular culture, the effort to do so fails to acknowledge how consistently Christian progressives root their case in terms of the most central Christian value of all: neighbor-love. Conservatives would like it to be otherwise--their case within the Christian community would be stronger if their opponents were simply buckling to secular forces. But this is not what is going on--it is a false characterization that impedes real dialogue.

It is important that secular voices not only remember this, but that they not reinforce--wittingly or unwittingly--this false characterization.

The other point that gets lost when we represent this week's election as the triumph of secular over religious values is this: There are some serious questions that need to be asked, not only about what should properly be called "secular," but also about what deserves the label "religious." On the former question, I think there really are such things as secular values--and I think they are best understood in something like the terms laid out by John Rawls, as found in this shared set of principles of fairness that everyone, regardless of their sectarian values, would embrace if they didn't know what position and privileges they and their sectarian community would enjoy within the social structure. And it may well be the case that the values Greta Christina highlights as having triumphed on Tuesday fall within this class.

But if so, that doesn't preclude them from also being religious values. On the contrary, the idea that you should abide by principles that you would like to live under even if you are not the one in power, even if you are not positioned as you are--this idea is the essential heart of the Golden Rule. Freedom of religion--including freedom from being subject to the mandates of a religion whose contestable sectarian doctrines you don't embrace--is arguably an expression of the Golden Rule, a rule enunciated with clarity by Jesus and repeatedly endorsed in Christian history as a way of living out the ethic of love. And it is a striking fact that the Golden Rule finds recurring expression in diverse religious traditions, so much so that it almost qualifies as ubiquitous. If this is right, than the core perspective that gives rise to "secular" values is also a deeply held religion one. Theocracy violates the Golden Rule--and hence violates religious values.

More significantly, I think there is a real problem with uncritically attaching the term "religious" to the values that Greta Christina takes to have been defeated on Tuesday. In other places I've argued that the religious right, to the extent that it relies on fear-mongering (and it isn't defined wholly by fear-mongering), puts itself outside the boundaries of any sort of religion or faith that is intellectually defensible, morally benign, and attuned to the transformative religious experiences that are the continuing wellspring of the human impulse to connect with the transcendent.

My own inclination, following the division I adopted from Plutarch in Is God a Delusion?, is to refer to the sort of fear-mongering that we saw among many far-right Republicans as superstitious fear-mongering. Religious faith professes to be about trust and love of God--and these things are not only different from but exclude anything that smacks of appeasement. If the divine is defined as a transcendent good worthy of our worship, as opposed to a powerful tyrannical force that demands our fawning subservience on pain of retaliatory strikes, then fear-mongering by its very nature is divorced from the divine. And if religion is about connecting with the divine, then "religious fear-mongering" becomes a nonsequitur.

Triumph over fear-mongering is, on this view of things, triumph over something that is by its very essence in opposition to the religious. And so, if secular values did triumph over fear-mongering this week, then those secular values have done religion a service. They have, if you will, cleared away one of those forces that prevents religion from blossoming in the world.

Making it Personal: Why Same-Sex Marriage Can't Be Just an "Issue"

In a post the other day in which I addressed my struggles about blogging and writing about the topic of same-sex marriage (and gay rights more generally), I stressed that for me this isn't just an issue. I put the point as follows:

One of the challenges on the issue of homosexuality and the church, however, is that I care about this issue because I care about the people who are affected by it, LGBT friends and family who I think have endured considerable hardship and suffering because of traditional views and the actions which follow from them.

And this means this isn't just an issue. There are some topics where "agreeing to disagree" is a way of showing mutual respect in the face of uncertainty. But given my understanding of what is at stake when it comes to such matters as the moral condemnation of homosexuality and opposition to same-sex marriage, to agree to disagree is to agree to let real people continue to be harmed.

A recent New York Times piece underscores the point I was trying to make in that post. The essay, "For Some, Same-Sex Marriage is not Politics, It's Personal," traces out how close personal relationships with gays and lesbians tends to be decisive in shaping one's views on gay rights issues. If you are close to someone who's gay, it's hard to persist in denying them and their intimate partnerships equality under the law.

For me, one of the most interesting parts of the New York Times piece discusses Maureen Walsh, a Republican state representative whose views on same-sex marriage were changed when her daughter came out:

Take Maureen Walsh. By night, Ms. Walsh runs Onion World, a sausage restaurant in Walla Walla, Wash., with her family. But by day, she is the Republican state representative for a district in the state’s conservative southeastern corner. She said she had no problem with domestic partnerships for same-sex couples. But when it came to marriage, she drew the line. Then she started thinking about her 26-year-old daughter, who recently came out of the closet.

“In some selfish way I did think what an affront to my beautiful daughter, who deserves something everybody else has in this country,” Ms. Walsh said in an interview, recalling how her decision to vote yes on the same-sex marriage bill that passed in Washington in February sprang more from a motherly impulse than from any political or ideological reasoning.

“It’s selfishness, but it’s motivated by love,” she said. “And I’d rather err on the side of love, wouldn’t you?”

I find it intiguing that she describes her motive as "selfish," while in the same breath describing her motivation as love. I suspect that, in fact, Walsh was confusing the "selfish" with the "personal." When her daughter came out, same-sex marriage could no longer be a merely abstract political issue. She suddenly found herself reflecting on this policy issue in light of an actual human being, a person Walsh loved with a mother's love. That is, she loved her daughter for the daughter's own sake. That's not selfishness, even if such love means your own welfare becomes bound up with the good of others. When you expand yourself through love, so that others' joys and sorrows affect your own welfare, you are taking a risk, making yourself vulnerable in new ways.

Selfish people don't do that. Selfish people try to keep things impersonal, so that they won't have to worry about being hurt by the sorrows and injustices that afflict others.

The Christian call to love, by contrast, is a call to make things personal. It is a call to try, as far as we are able, to love those who are affected by what we do and the policies we endorse, and to let our decisions in such matters be shaped by that love. We must try to love them as a mother loves--so that when they suffer, we suffer. So that when they feel like they are cut off from the bedrock institution of social life, we feel cut off. So that when they weep to hear their president announce a message of inclusion--as Andrew Sullivan recently did--we can understand and empathetically grasp their joy.

To be committed to an ethic of love is to be committed to making such matters as same-sex marriage personal. If it's just an abstract issue for us, just some political policy decision to be assessed on the basis of some impersonal "principles" and "values," we aren't being guided by an ethic of love. When Jesus said, "The Sabbath is made for man, not man for the Sabbath," he was making a profound statement about the priorities that flow from an ethic of love. Principles and rules exist for the sake of people, not the other way around. If a rule no longer serves the people we're supposed to love, then it's the rule that has to give way.

This isn't to say that there aren't any hard-and-fast rules. Rather, it's is to say that we have to make those decisions--about which rules are inviolate, and which need to admit of exceptions--from a standpoint of love, a standpoint in which we care, personally, about those who are affected by the rules.

When you love your gay and lesbian neighbors in a personal way, you understand how unequal access to marriage affects them--because you care about them enough to pay attention. And you don't just assume that their same-sex attraction is a harmful or dysfunctional desire akin to the alcoholic's craving for alcohol; because you base your views about such matters on how the same-sex attraction is integrated into their lives as a whole. Whose lives are richer, fuller, more personally and spiritually whole? Those who repress and deny their same-sex attraction? Or is it those who accept those desires as part of who they are and then looks for ways to live out those desires responsibly--perhaps by following the same model that serves as the heterosexual standard for responsible sexuality, namely marriage?

It is not possible to make pronouncements about gays and lesbians that are utter hogwash--as Paul Cameron is wont to do--if you pay the kind of attention to gays and lesbians that love demands. If what you are saying is personal, because what you are saying materially affects people you love, then you are less likely to perpetuate deeply harmful misinformation. You'll make sure, before you say something, that it isn't slander. (I'd advise clicking over to the Cameron recording only if you have a stomach for listening to extremely abusive and slanderous falsehoods spoken as if they were gospel truth; if you can't stomach that sort of thing, then don't listen.)

The New York Times essay observes that, when the same-sex marriage issue is personal, political divisions and ideologies tend to fall away. Support for same-sex marriage tends to increase. This seems correct, but my point is not this merely descriptive one. My point is that we ought to make it personal.

For those committed to an ethic of love, this cannot and must not be merely an issue about which we have a political opinion. It must be personal. And if it isn't personal already, then go out and make it personal. Find your gay and lesbian neighbors, and ask them about their lives. And listen in love.