Affirming queer people is about Christian love, not 'secular ideology'

It would be intolerable if someone argued that people of different races could not love one another. Attempting to normalize the same bigotry against queer people is pure hypocrisy for Christians.

I’m aware that in certain pockets of the United States, interracial love and marriage are still frowned upon. However, it’s fairly clear that the majority of Americans would call that position racist. It’s disturbing that opposition queer love and queer marriage is not similarly called out.

David French appropriately wrote that “if conservative Christians are angry at progressive Americans for believing they are hateful hypocrites, then they have only themselves to blame.” He is absolutely right that bigoted Christians earn their label as hateful hypocrites (which, notably, is a primary reason why young people leave churches). And while he openly critiques individuals who claim Christians are persecuted, he sort of takes it back when he argues that secular Americans want to “push the church into conformance with a secular political ideology.”

French is reportedly being rejected these days by his increasingly conservative and fascistic friends. He has written about why he was canceled by his own church. French knows the pain of exclusion, and yet he can’t extend it to queer people who are asking for dignity. Instead of honoring them, he reduces their simple claim to human rights as “ideological.” While he correctly says Christians aren’t persecuted, his inability to distinguish between Christian bigotry and inclusion, love, and tolerance, is a significant blindspot. He writes, “both sides tear into each other with an inexcusable level of fury and malice.” The fact is that non-affirming churches put their queer attenders at greater risk for suicide. Fury about that is entirely excusable. Naming them as the bigots they are is not malicious—it is true. Trying to normalize that bigotry as Christian faith and belief is dangerous and we must disrupt it. Christianity is not a bigoted religion, and its adherents who are, borrow their ideas from a sexist and homophobic world.

First, plenty of Christians have adopted his so-called “secular political ideology” when they became affirming. Plenty of Christians are queer themselves. To assert that our sacred scriptures hold within them a mandate against queer people is both anachronistic (since gender and sexual orientation, as we know them, are new ideas) and also rejects the universal love and inclusion that is overwhelming characterizes our scriptures. Paul, writing to the Romans, tells them not to conform to the patterns of this world. And I want to say that bigoted Christians are conforming to the homophobia and transphobia of the world; conforming to God means moving toward love and inclusion. Though they are wrong, I offer them sympathy because it wasn’t so long ago that I was a (closeted) nonaffirming pastor—I repent of my conformity to the world’s homophobia. 

There’s nothing wrong with protecting queer people when the United States has democratically decided that they are worth protection. Christians who don’t want to offer that should be plainly named as the bigots they are and suffer the consequences. If their views increasingly isolate them, and they choose to leave denominations that are affirming, so be it. As French says, “They only have themselves to blame.”

I’m grateful for a growing consensus among Americans and people of every nationality that queer people deserve dignity and freedom and rights. Sixty-nine percent of Americans support gay marriage, for example. Front and center at the DNC was affirmation of queer folks, including the openly gay Secetary of Transportation and the cosistent call to honor the rights and dignity of all, regardless of their sexual orientation. I am grateful that we are moving toward moral agreement Queer people aren’t the first group people who fought for such agreement, and evidently, the fight continues, this time with under the guise of religious liberty. The more we can stamp out that idea, the safer our most vulnerable will be.

I want to live in a world where loving everyone is a moral imperative. I don’t think Christians are being oppressed when they are faced with the consequences of their bigotry. They certainly aren’t persecuted. When there is legal and cultural pressure for them to change, it is because they took too long to do so. 

Many individuals who are related to queer folks often soften their views. But I’m living proof that personal relationships are often not enough. I’m proof that polite conversations and gentle, self-disclosing vulnerability doesn’t always change hearts and minds. Sometimes relational proximity is not enough to move people to love. I still love my family and hold them close, even when they don’t affirm me, but it does cost us intimacy. I hold that tension because sometimes we need to dust our heels when someone won’t believe us. And if a moral consensus follows, the people who feel pressure to change may cry out about their persecution and loss of power, but they will have earned it because of their own recalcitrance.

Including queer people in Christian faith is not ideological conformity. It is a matter of love. And Christianity, like other faiths, is fundamentally centered on love. Love of the other is so central to our faith that the writer of 1 John names God as love. God’s love is vast and expansive, and it certainly includes queer people. Christians conforming to that inclusive love, aren’t conforming to an ideology, but rather conforming themselves to God.