[This is the next in the questions I’m answering every Wednesday from members of Serendipitydodah for Moms, a private Facebook group for Christian moms of LGBT kids. (The first was Combatting the Downward Pull of Christian Negativity. If you are interested in joining the group, email lizdyer55@gmail.com.) Also, I’ll be sending out my monthly newsletter tomorrow. I’m a little late on that, so in addition to the book I talked about here, I’m going to add as a giveway in that newsletter an autographed and inscribed copy of my book UNFAIR: Christians and the LGBT Question. Sign up for the newsletter here. Thanks guys. Love to you.]
Dear John,
I’ve only heard messages about homosexuality being a sin a few times in my church. When I spoke to my pastor about my lesbian daughter, his advice was to love her, but if she still stayed in a gay relationship, and did not repent, he questioned if she ever made a true commitment to The Lord or was really saved. He then said that everyone, gay or straight, would be welcome in his church.
I’m still going to the same church, but can’t feel the same about it. Even if the messages are not overtly against LGBT people, I still feel stung—especially when he preaches that we must obey the Word regardless of what the world says is right or wrong, when he says we must not love our children more than God, when he says we are living in increasingly evil days, etc., etc. Before I knew I had a gay child, I would be inclined to agree with him when he said such things. Now I bristle when I hear these messages.
Do you think I am just being overly sensitive? Because I don’t think I would bristle hearing those same messages from an affirming minister.
Signed,
A hurting mom looking for an anti sting ointment
Dear Mom,
I’m going to put this in strong language that I’ll ask you ahead of time to forgive, especially if it causes you any pain.
Your pastor is the very worst kind of bully—and he’s bullying, very specifically, you. Indirectly through you, or directly if she attends your church, he is also bullying your daughter.
I don’t care how reticently, or, as he clearly did with you (“I question whether your daughter is really a Christian”) how passive-aggressively he put it to you. Your pastor clearly believes—and very clearly, since apparently he’s preached from the pulpit that homosexuality is a sin—that your daughter is going to hell. (I say this because it’s inevitable that a Christian who believes homosexuality to be a sin also believes in hell.)
What kind of ignorant, arrogant, arrogant, arrogant charlatan of a pastor counsels a Christian woman that if her gay daughter doesn’t stop being gay then she can’t really be a Christian—and is therefore going to spend eternity suffering unimaginable agony?
It doesn’t matter how wise and benevolent your pastor has ever seemed to you. He has now shown you who he really is. He has proven to you that immediately beneath his pastoral patina is waiting to pounce a bigoted, manifestly cruel bully.
A bully uses his power to purposefully and methodically humiliate and degrade people weaker than he. Your pastor is using the authority of the pulpit—one of the most powerful and persuasive places in the world—to do what he has absolutely no moral or Biblical authority to do, which is to both overtly and covertly condemn your daughter, who is guilty of nothing whatsoever but daring to become the person she was born to be, which is something all good people are supposed to do.
Overly sensitive? For bristling at the pronouncement that God finds your innocent daughter a moral abomination—that if she calls herself a Christian then she is a liar?
Homie don’t think so.
I’m the author of UNFAIR: Christians and the LGBT Question:
Paperback. Kindle. NookBook. Signed and inscribed by me according to your direction.
Ad-Free & Subscriber Log-In