A pastor’s brief address to the Springfield, Missouri City Council has gone viral online, seen by more than 2.5 million viewers in just two months. He begins by saying, “Any accurate reading of the Bible should make it clear that gay rights goes against the clear word of God,” and proceeds for two more minutes, citing relevant verses as proof. As his time is running out, he concludes, “You see, the right of segregation … hold on [here he fumbles with his notes in apparent confusion] …the right of segregation is clearly established by the Holy Scriptures.” Finally he pivots masterfully to make his point. “I’m sorry, I have been reading direct quotes from preachers in the 1950s and ‘60s all in support of racial segregation. I just substituted the words gay rights instead.” It’s a powerful reminder of how the Bible has been “used” in the past to promote discrimination.
Progressive Christians are finally realizing that “the clobber passages” cited in the Old and New Testaments as evidence of God’s displeasure with homosexuality have been misunderstood, misinterpreted and misused for centuries. Many conservative and reform Jews are likewise entering an era of new enlightenment on the subject. There are three brief examples below. Hopefully they might spur intellectually curious readers (or tortured closet-cases like I was for 50 years) to read more in depth. Highly recommended reading are authors Jack Rogers (Jesus, The Bible, and Homosexuality: Explode the Myths, Heal the Church), Mel White (Stranger at the Gate), and Jeff Miner and John Tyler Connoley (The Children Are Free). Or if a novel is preferred, try Kittredge Cherry (Jesus in Love), Theodore Jennings, Jr. (The Man Jesus Loved), or my own contemporary suspense tale, The Kairos.
Clobber passage #1: Sodom’s sins. A story in Genesis 19 tells of angels who visit Abraham, the father of the monotheistic religions Judaism, Christianity and Islam. For centuries, a surface reading of the tale was believed to indict the men of the city for homosexuality. The men clamored to rape the male angels who were visiting Abraham’s home. The story and its explanation warrant far deeper discussion, but suffice it here to remind all people of faith that “we let the Bible interpret the Bible.” So what do the scriptures say the sins of Sodom were? Of the 20 interpretations in both Testaments, not one cites homosexuality. Ezekiel’s listing is typical: pride, hoarding, ignoring the poor and needy, haughtiness, and abominations (“persons, things or actions that are disgusting, vicious, vile, etc.”). If someone righteously cites Sodom as proof, Ezekiel might suggest it is the clobberer who will suffer the consequences of his judgment, not the clobberee.
Clobber passage #2: Leviticus’ lying (with men). Oft-quoted and shallowly understood are the holiness code prohibitions in Leviticus 18 and 20. (Side note: a friend pointed out that the Bible contains seven prohibitions for homosexuals, and 363 for heterosexuals; he added, “It’s not that God loves heterosexuals less, but He does think they need more supervision.”). The first response is that full understanding requires knowledge of the practices of the existing nations which God was setting His people Israel apart from. Those “heathens’” had false gods, temple prostitutes, fertility rites and more. The second response is that only a tiny percentage of Jews, and virtually no Christians, still observe all the holiness code requirements. If we did, a fundamentalist Christian friend who likes bacon-wrapped shrimp with a cheese sauce would be doomed four ways. No tattoos or cotton-poly blends would be allowed, and we would stone to death not only adulterous women, but any of our children who cursed us. Does it make us faithless if we have new, progressive understandings of those dietary and death-penalty rules? Not at all. It means we also know that God wrote, “Behold I will do a new thing …. Shall ye not know it?” and Paul added “When I was a child … I understood as a child.”
Clobber passage #3: Saint Paul’s unnatural relations. We all probably have some aunt/uncle/cousin we would call an unnatural relation. But in Romans 1, the globe-trotting Christian convert Paul says plainly, “… the men, leaving the natural use [contrary to nature] of the woman, burned in their lust one toward another.” Here again, readers whose faith and orientation seem to be at war need at least two warning flags about this passage. (1) In the first century A.D., assumptions about many things—including a flat earth, a sun that revolved around it, and variety in human sexual orientations—were obviously not as advanced as ours after 2,000 years of scientific inquiry. So, if 95 percent of the population had an opposite-sex attraction then (as now), the five percent who had a same-sex attraction were labeled “unnatural.” (We can forgive him for that … even 20 centuries haven’t brought some people to that basic level of acceptance). (2) The one other place St. Paul uses the phrase translated as “contrary to nature,” his meaning is extraordinarily positive! In Romans 11, he likens the new Gentile Christians to “branches cut from a wild olive tree” and grafted “contrary to nature” into a good tree (the Jewish race). How much more positive could a phrase get from a good Jew who spent his life preaching about Christ?
Almost every objection to same-sex marriage boils down essentially to a religious objection to homosexuality. As people of faith mature in their understanding and focus on their faith’s over-arching emphasis on love, commitment, and Golden Rule care for themselves and their neighbors, they stop trying to emulate God the Judge. They strive to emulate God the Gracious.
In 20 years, the prohibitions against same-sex marriage will sound as uneducated and anachronistic as the Springfield pastor’s quotes which called racial segregation “biblical.”
Paul Hartman is a retired PBS/NPR station executive with a passion for biblical history. He is a Presbyterian elder, a lay preacher and a Dead Sea Scrolls aficionado. A father and grandfather, Hartman says he wrote The Kairos after serious Bible study revealed two repeatedly-quoted words from God as the answer to his lifelong battle with fear.
