According to research by the Barna Group:
The most common perception is that present-day Christianity is “anti-homosexual.” Overall, 91 percent of young non-Christians and 80 percent of young churchgoers say this phrase describes Christianity. As the research probed this perception, non-Christians and Christians explained that beyond their recognition that Christians oppose homosexuality, they believe that Christians show excessive contempt and unloving attitudes towards gays and lesbians. One of the most frequent criticisms of young Christians was that they believe the church has made homosexuality a “bigger sin” than anything else.
That’s just plain wrong. So where’d it come from?
Theory No. 5: It’s the politics, stupid
In trying to explain this weird new pre-eminence of the Doctrine of Hatin’ Gays it doesn’t matter that most Christians believe homosexuality is a sin and that the Bible says it’s wrong. That could explain it being a perception, but not the “most common perception.” Mere theological opposition cannot explain “excessive contempt.”
The Bible, after all, says a lot of things are wrong: gossip, swearing oaths, retaliation, lending at interest or even lending with the expectation of repayment. None of those is the “most common perception” of American Christianity. None of those are perceived, really, as having much of anything to do with American Christianity. If you meet an American who does not believe in retaliation, you’re more likely to think they’re a Buddhist than a Christian. If you meet an American who opposes lending at interest, you’ll probably assume they’re a Muslim. And if you meet an American who lends without expectation of repayment and never engages in gossip, then … well actually, this being America, you won’t meet such a person.
The above examples aren’t entirely fair. All of those things are expressly and unambiguously prohibited and condemned in the Bible, but they’re not really considered sins by American Christians.* So, OK, lets look at some other examples that everyone still regards as full-fledged sins.
How about lying and stealing? These are prohibited by the ninth and eighth commandments (or the eighth and seventh, for my Catholic and Lutheran friends). American Christians believe these are sins. American Christians are morally, ethically and theologically opposed to them. Yet neither “anti-lying” nor “anti-stealing” turns up as a common description of these Christians, let alone as the most common perception. And in neither case would this opposition be characterized as “excessive contempt.”
So these moral, ethical and theological considerations and concerns about what the Bible teaches are beside the point. They are neither necessary nor sufficient to explain why excessive contempt for homosexuals should be the dominant attribute of American Christianity. It has to be something else.
I think it is. I think it has very little to do with religion and everything to do with politics.
The perception that Barna documents is, I think, primarily a perception of evangelical Christians. The Barna Group is an organization based in the evangelical subculture, and while they provide generally reliable data, they are also prone, at times, to the evangelical tendency to use “Christian” and “evangelical Christian” interchangeably. (This recalls Focus on the Family spokesman Gary Schneeberger’s statement, “We use that word — Christian — to refer to people who are evangelical Christians.”) Evangelical Christians also tend to be the most outspokenly sectarian, so this interchangeable terminology is often lazily reflected in the media as well. Barna’s survey respondents clearly weren’t thinking of the Christians who attend Metropolitan Community Churches or the United Churches of Christ. And I think the survey would have produced quite different results if respondents had been asked specifically about the black church, or Presbyterians or even Roman Catholics.
So let’s consider evangelical American Christians in particular. Evangelicals tend to be earnest, generous and accustomed to listening to people in authority. They also tend to be sheltered, ingenuous and suspicious of intellectualism. All of that makes them particularly susceptible to hucksters and demagogues. The history of hucksterism in American evangelicalism is long and storied and sad, but I’m more concerned here with the demagoguery. American evangelicalism in the late-20th and early-21st century has been shaped by demagogues.
The most visible and influential leaders in American evangelicalism are not theologians or clergymen like Billy Graham, John Stott or J.I. Packer, but rather parachurch activists and media barons like Pat Robertson, the late Jerry Falwell and wife-beating apologist James Dobson — the self-proclaimed spokesmen and self-appointed magisterium of the religious right. Such leaders are not mainly about the spiritual growth and well-being of their followers, nor are they about spreading the gospel. They are about amassing and consolidating power.
The religious right portrays itself as a religious movement seeking to reshape politics, but in fact it is a political movement seeking to reshape religion. Its agenda — at which it has been distressingly successful — has always been to turn a church into a voting bloc.
The demagogues of the religious right pursue power — political and economic power — by preying on fears and prejudices. Their power depends upon the perception of barbarians at the gate, on the perception that some menacing Other is on the verge of destroying all that their followers hold dear. This Other, the demagogue’s scapegoat who must die for our salvation, can’t be something that presents a genuine danger, because that would expose the demagogue’s impotence to protect his followers from real threats.
Homosexuals make an ideal scapegoat for the demagogues manipulating and fleecing their evangelical flock. The safe-target dynamic ensures that your scapegoat isn’t someone your sheep are likely to know or empathize with, and the innocent-backlash claim provides a fig leaf that allows the demagogues to claim that the nastiness they’re promoting is justifiable.
The only real difficulty with demonizing homosexuals is that they’re not actually demons. Homosexuals don’t actually present any kind of threat at all to American evangelicals. The demagogues overcome this obstacle by doing what demagogues are best at: lying. Homosexuals, they claim, are a threat to Marriage, and to The Family, and to the Word of God. Reality doesn’t support such claims, so they embellish reality. They claim that same-sex marriage would destroy the institution of marriage because, um, mumblemumblemumble pound pulpit, it just would! Same-sex marriage, they claim, would mean your church would be forced to perform gay weddings.** They claim that hate-crimes legislation protecting homosexuals from violent intimidation would mean that pastors could be arrested for quoting from Leviticus. They claim ENDA — the bill that would prohibit employment discrimination based on sexual orientation — would mean your church could be legally forced to hire a gay pastor. It would mean no such thing, and they know it would mean no such thing. The lie is deliberate, intentional, lovingly crafted to nurture fear and the unthinking allegiance that fear can create.
It is no accident that excessive contempt for homosexuals has become the most common perception of American evangelicalism. That contempt has been deliberately nurtured, fed and guided by demagogues seeking to manufacture fear that can be channeled into political power.
By laying so much blame on these demagogues, it might seem like I’m trying to excuse or exonerate the rank-and-file evangelicals who follow them, but I don’t think this really provides them with room to boast. I am suggesting that, left to their own devices, those evangelicals probably wouldn’t be quite as contemptuous and bigoted as they’ve allowed ourselves to become due to their unquestioning allegiance to ill-chosen leaders. This contempt and bigotry, the argument suggests, isn’t something they would have pursued quite so single-mindedly on their own, merely something they willingly embraced at the behest of leaders who preyed on their fear and naivete.*** That’s hardly grounds for congratulations.
The suggestion that evangelicals have fallen prey to demagogues presents a difficult problem. It means they’ve been duped, and no one likes to admit they’ve been duped — particularly when, as is so often the case, the con works by exploiting something less than admirable in the victims’ character. This is why crime statistics on scams and con games aren’t wholly reliable. Many victims are reluctant — out of shame and embarrassment — to report these crimes. Admitting that you handed over your money due to greed or foolishness is not easy to do.
Admitting that you’ve been manipulated by duplicitous demagogues exploiting your own fears, insecurities and prejudices isn’t easy to do, either, so I’m afraid my message here for American evangelicals is something of a bitter pill that I don’t know how to sugarcoat. The current situation, represented by the findings of the Barna Group above, is not something they can be proud of. Forced to confront this reality, evangelicals will have to provide an apology of one kind or another.
That word “apology,” of course, has two meanings. It can mean an admission of fault, an acceptance of responsibility accompanied by a plea for pardon and an attempt to make restitution. Or it can mean almost the opposite — a formal, defiant defense. The demagogues offer the latter sort of apology for the gay-hatin’ gospel Barna identifies. Whether or not the rank and file of evangelicals will continue to follow them remains to be seen, but the other kind of apology is their only other option.
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* These sins were not downgraded due to any conscious theological decision, nor due to any explicit attempt to justify American Christians’ disregarding the clear meaning of the text. They are not considered sins primarily because of cultural reasons that are rarely, if ever, explored by those within American culture. See earlier, “Let us reason together.”
** You know, just like when President Clinton sent the National Guard into St. Patrick’s Cathedral to force Archbishop O’Connor to bless the wedding of two divorced Roman Catholics. (Addendum: To clarify, no, that never happened. And it never could happen. Religious groups are free to perform wedddings only for members in good standing of their respective communities, and they are free to define for themselves such membership in good standing however they see fit. The legal recognition of same-sex marriage would not change that.)
*** H.L. Mencken’s ungenerous definition of a demagogue: “One who will preach doctrines he knows to be untrue to men he knows to be idiots.” In his defense, the old fart was, I think, hoping that by ridiculing suckers for being suckers he might provoke them to stop being suckers.
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