LGBTQ+ and the debate in Christendom

Last month, Pope Francis sent shock waves throughout all of Christendom by endorsing civil unions for same-sex marriage, even though he still opposes homosexuality. Also last month, in Albany, Episcopal Bishop William Love decided to resign over his refusal to accept the Episcopal Church’s embrace of samesex marriage.

Virtually every major Christian denomination in the Western world has grappled with controversies surrounding homosexuality over the last decades, and last month’s developments in the Catholic and Episcopal churches indicate such controversies will not abate anytime soon. Indeed, until the coronavirus derailed their 2020 conference, the United Methodist Church was set to finalize an official schism plan of its own over homosexuality. One UMC church in Savannah, Ga., has already decided to split.

The fact is that the LGBTQ+ movement is a thoroughly secular movement in origin and content. It is not that the movement is per se hostile to religious questions, but the basic priority of the movement is to ensure that religious institutions conform to its baseline conception of homosexuality — namely the movement’s deeply held dogma that homosexuality is attributable to an immutable sexual orientation — and to get those institutions to support the public policies that flow from that dogma.

This foisting of an entirely secular construct of homosexuality onto theologically defined institutions oftentimes makes for strange bedfellows, and can make for extremely dangerous psychological formulations.

Case in point: Alphonso David, president of the largest U.S. gay rights organization, the Human Rights Campaign, gave a ringing endorsement of Pope Francis’ civil unions remarks, an endorsement that has the effect of sending a signal to uninformed, unchurched people who may be insecure about their homosexuality that they will find a “welcoming and affirming environment” at their local Catholic church. In fact, they are more likely to encounter a priest who teaches that homosexu

ality is an offense to God and that same-sex attracted people should live as celibates if they want to get to heaven.

Yet such spiritual intricacy does not matter to a secular institution like HRC. All that matters is that Pope Francis is now on board with civil unions. In that secular mindset, the pope is but a political box that can be checked, not a man who has real, imminent potential to do grave spiritual and psychological harm to vulnerable

people who were misled into thinking their sexuality would be accepted by the Catholic Church.

The evidence we have of Jesus’ teachings on the subject of human sexuality all point to one common thread: Lust, even within heterosexual marriage, is an affront to God. An LGBTQ+ Christian activist’s boilerplate talking point that “Jesus never once mentions homosexuality” simply does not resonate with any traditional Christian who is witnessing a society convulsed by lust.

Progressive Christian activists who adopt the secular-born

LGBTQ+ template to advance more embracing ecclesiastical stances on homosexuality will eventually find themselves up against a brick wall. It’s not merely that their extant theological argumentation is always on the defensive — heaven forbid they go on the offensive to explain how sacred homoaffection can enhance the spiritual life — it’s that the very purpose of the Gospel, vis-à-vis the subject of human sexuality, is to confront and counter lust, not to create social and political networks for its flourishing.

So long as a philosophical template born entirely of the secular world — the secular dogma of sexual orientation — is clumsily foisted onto theologically defined institutions, the embrace of sacred homosexuality within Christendom will be far from universal. It is time for Christians who believe in the sacredness of homosexuality to stop using the old wineskins of the LGBTQ+ movement as their emotional carrying case for the God-given wine of same-sex love and intimacy.