Gordon College Expels Dietrich Bonhoeffer Because He’s Gay -- Christianity Today Magazine Won’t Hire Him Either...

“Gordon College Expels Dietrich Bonhoeffer Because He’s Gay — Christianity Today Magazine Won’t Hire Him Either!” is a headline that would have been insane but understandable in Germany in 1939. Does it make sense in America of 2014?

A few weeks ago I met the president of Gordon College. We both happened to be attending a reading by Charles Marsh (Commonwealth Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Virginia) from his new book Strange Glory: A Life of Dietrich Bonhoeffer. The event took place in the glorious Trinity Church of Boston.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the German pastor, theologian, and anti-Hitler conspirator, is one of the most inspiring Christian thinkers of all time. His death at the hands of Hitler raised him to a level of a credible witness to the Christian faith like almost no other modern religious figure.

As noted in the Christianity Today review of Marsh’s monumental, definitive (and wonderfully readable) biography of the Protestant saint, the book proves that Dietrich Bonhoeffer was gay.

As the CT reviewer wryly notes: “Marsh makes a convincing case that Bonhoeffer harbored feelings for Bethge that extended beyond friendship…”

A few weeks after the reading the news broke that Gordon’s president D. Michael Lindsay, had co-signed a letter along with the editor of Christianity Today asking the Obama administration to grant Gordon and Christianity Today Magazine and others a “religious exemption” in order that they could legally discriminate against gay men and women… people just like Dietrich Bonhoeffer.

As noted by the Boston Globe:

The president of Gordon College is defending his support for a religious exemption to forthcoming federal regulations banning antigay discrimination, saying his “sole intention” was to affirm the Christian school’s support for religious liberty.

D. Michael Lindsay said he joined other religious leaders in calling for the exemption in order to affirm the “right of faith-based institutions to set and adhere to standards which derive from our shared framework of faith.”

“Signing the letter was in keeping with our decades-old conviction that, as an explicitly Christian institution, Gordon should set the conduct expectations for members of our community,” Lindsay wrote in a statement posted Monday on the Wenham college’s website.

The German church that abandoned Dietrich Bonhoeffer and backed Hitler was ready to work with the Nazis because they believed that the Nazis were upholding Christian morality. In other words they believed that fascism upheld the right of faith-based institutions to “set and adhere to standards which derive from our shared framework of faith,” say the right to persecute “Christ-killing Jews,” “degenerate homosexuals” and “vagabond Romani People” (Gypsies).

And what does the Gordon/Christianity Today Magazine “stand” against gay civil rights, like the right to employment or an education, have to do with following Jesus? Not much. As I say in Chapter 18 of my new book WHY I AM AN ATHEIST WHO BELIEVES IN GOD: How to give love, create beauty and find peace:

The follower of Jesus’ example—be she an atheist scientist working on a neuropsychology project, a pastor counseling gang members, a husband bringing his wife her coffee or a mom picking up her child at preschool—will do anything it takes to live the reality of what it means to walk in another person’s shoes. To help us do that is the only point of going to any church…’

At the reading I noticed that Lindsay applauded Charles Marsh warmly. Who was he clapping for? Surely it wasn’t for the great German gay Christian martyr and defender of black Americans and other minorities everywhere. And Christianity Today lauds a book about Bonhoeffer but would not let him work there if he lived in a time and place where he could have come out.

As for the editors of Christianity Today that liked the book about the safely dead German gay saint, but want the administration to give them the right to fire people just like Bonhoeffer, who might want a job at their magazine—shame on them!

I’m betting that if Bonhoeffer was here now he’d be firmly on the side of the Obama administration calling out the gay-bashing tilt of today’s American bigots who run places like Christianity Today and Gordon. I’ll bet he’d also call out these “Christians” for hiding behind words like religious liberty when what they mean is the liberty to be mean and flout the law.

If religious liberty means taking away other people’s basic civil rights including the right to work, teach and study, then evangelicals need to come up with another term to describe their movement, say National Socialism… or something catchy like that.

They also should stop being mealy-mouthed about their real intent. “We just are defending religious liberty” is a cop-out.

As David Letterman would say, these are weasel words!

It’s an Orwellian lie to describe the real goal of the Evangelical establishment and their neoconservative Roman Catholic cronies, as freedom loving. What they want is the “right” to persecute gay men and women– for just being gay. Period.

Frank Schaeffer is a writer. His latest book —WHY I AM AN ATHEIST WHO BELIEVES IN GOD: How to give love, create beauty and find peace