Popular author and evangelist Tony Campolo (finally) released a formal statement yesterday “urging the church to be more welcoming” of LGBT Christians and their relationships.
This isn’t surprising. He is, after all, married to Peggy Campolo, who has long been a formidable, indomitable voice within white evangelical Christianity for the full inclusion and equality of LGBT Christians in the church. Most American evangelicals have avoided losing this argument with Peggy Campolo by avoiding it and ignoring her, but that wasn’t an option for Tony.
Plus, he’s 80 years old and semi-retired. That means he’s no longer in a hostage situation when it comes to the thousands of children aided by his former ministry, EAPE. Perhaps it seems unseemly to suggest that was a factor in Tony Campolo’s prior ambiguity on the subject of LGBT people, but the stakes were real, and high, for those kids. And the implicit (sometimes explicit) threats were real, too — as the recent experience with World Vision demonstrates. That Christian development agency lost 10,000 child sponsors due to its brief, abortive wobble from the Official Required Stance, so it might be understandable if this had been a factor in Campolo’s prior reluctance to speak as forthrightly as he now has.
Campolo’s change of heart and change of mind is important. It might have been far more important had it come sooner, of course. Agreeing with his spouse back in 2005 would’ve been genuinely prophetic and bold. Agreeing with her back in 1995 might’ve been a seismic game-changer. But in 2015 it’s not quite as impressive.
Still, as Sarah Pulliam Bailey points out, Tony is a prominent figure, and it’s still rare to see white evangelical leaders from his generation getting on board with a growing share of their younger counterparts: “Campolo joins a handful of Baby Boomer evangelical leaders who have shifted into supporting same-sex marriage. Just 21 percent of evangelicals who are above the age of 50 favor gays and lesbians marrying legally, compared to 37 percent of evangelicals between 18 and 49.”
(Before diminishing Campolo’s statement as too-late on board the bandwagon, consider even that 37 percent figure for younger evangelicals. That’s roughly the same share of white evangelicals who are willing to admit to pollsters — in secret — that they favor legal abortion.)
The substance of Tony’s announcement is also a bit more tepid and apologetic than it ought to be. He takes an oddly misdirected pastoral tone that seems to focus more on his pastoral concern for anti-gay evangelicals than for the LGBT Christians they’ve been excluding, dehumanizing and declaring unclean. That gives it a cautious, defensive air that seems more concerned with not afflicting the comfortable than with comforting the afflicted. He urges his fellow evangelicals not to exclude LGBT Christians, but at the same time he pleads with them not to exclude him for saying so.
Kimberly Knight, Brandan Robertson and Eliel Cruz all express appreciation for Campolo’s statement as well as optimism about the potential impact he may have as a prominent and popular leader. But they all also express some thoughtful, solid critique, and those are all worth your time to click over and read:
• Kimberly Knight, “Regarding Evangelical Tony Campolo’s ‘acceptance’ of gay, Christian couples”
• Brandan Robertson, “Tony Campolo Calls for Full Inclusion of Gay & Lesbian Christians”
• Eliel Cruz, “Tony Campolo announces support for inclusion of ‘gay Christian couples'”
Let me just quote a bit from Kimberly Knight’s response:
I am holding in delicate tension my genuine gratitude for folks who do and are changing their hearts and minds every day, exasperation (and a little suspicion) with late starts, and faithful clarity that anything less than full inclusion in church and society is a denial of the sacred worth and very humanity of LGBT people. Of me.
Her frustration recalls what Dr. King called “the fierce urgency of now” — an urgency and ferocity that Campolo’s Official Statement fails to convey.
That’s a function, in part, of genre. This is an Official Statement announcing his change of “stance” on an “issue.” Such Official Statements are a kind of ritual genre in the white evangelical tribe, and that genre both limits what can be said and shapes how it can be said. They cannot be about justice or injustice directly, but only about one’s “stance” toward them. And they aren’t constructed to accommodate or acknowledge actual people, only the “issues” that affect them.
This displaces the conversation — removing it several steps from the fierce urgency of now and pushing it off toward some more abstract and ethereal discussion of the relative validity of various possible “stances” and their status within the tribe.
That doesn’t mean that such formal, rigidly constructed and conscribed Official Statements cannot still do some good. As Knight says, “Each and every voice in the evangelical world that speaks of out loud about loving gay people is good. Those words might fall upon the ears of just one other pastor who will for maybe the first time consider thinking differently.”
And they can give occasion, and give courage, to others who may also choose to speak up and speak out. Tony’s statement has already done so — inspiring former long-time Christianity Today editor David Neff to offer an Official Statement of his own, praising and agreeing with Campolo and writing that “I think the ethically responsible thing for gay and lesbian Christians to do is to form lasting, covenanted partnerships. I also believe that the church should help them in those partnerships in the same way the church should fortify traditional marriages.”
Neff is, like Tony, retired. CT’s current editor, Mark Galli, is not. Galli thus responds to Neff’s Official Statement with an Official Statement of his own.*
Galli’s Christianity Today editorial, posted yesterday, could be summarized by the opening lines of an essay also posted yesterday by an evangelical scholar at a leading evangelical seminary:
Certain kinds of people simply cannot be part of the people of God.
Making such a judgment is not based on bigotry. It is simply based on the story of God in which the people of God are defined in particular ways. These definitions demand that some are out while others are in.
Those definitions are definite, Christianity Today says. They are given to us by the inerrant, authoritative, unchanging Word of God. And to question those definitions is to question the authority of the Bible itself.
All true, says that evangelical professor. But we need to see what else he says as well.
We’ll get to that next.
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* Is Mark Galli piously “saddened” by Neff and Campolo? Of course. Does this “sadness” seem like a fatuous, hollow, sanctimonious regurgitation of everything the tribal gatekeepers require in an Official Statement Reaffirming the Official Required Stance? Of course. Does he employ this pious sadness to mischaracterize the statements and arguments of those who sadden him in a blatant exercise of sheer dishonesty? Of course:
We at CT are sorry when fellow evangelicals modify their views to accord with the current secular thinking on this matter. And we’ll continue to be sorry, because over the next many years, there will be other evangelicals who similarly reverse themselves on sexual ethics.
But let’s not judge. The performance of such fatuous, forced piety is, again, partly a function of genre. And unemployment really, really does suck.
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