{"id":16137,"date":"2013-07-04T02:12:46","date_gmt":"2013-07-04T06:12:46","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/?p=16137"},"modified":"2013-07-04T02:13:12","modified_gmt":"2013-07-04T06:13:12","slug":"neil-steinberg-dave-gushee-on-the-damaging-idea-that-hating-gays-is-a-bedrock-of-christian-faith","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/2013\/07\/04\/neil-steinberg-dave-gushee-on-the-damaging-idea-that-hating-gays-is-a-bedrock-of-christian-faith\/","title":{"rendered":"Neil Steinberg & Dave Gushee on the damaging idea that ‘hating gays is a bedrock of Christian faith’"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

William Lindsey<\/a>\u00a0points us to Neil Steinberg\u2019s recent column, which I\u2019m tempted to quote here in full. It\u2019s titled \u201cAnti-gay bias loses its legal whip<\/a>,\u201d but really Steinberg\u2019s topic is sectarian coercion \u2014 the ability to require others, by law, to follow the particular dictates of your own sect. That\u2019s a bad idea, Steinberg suggests, and an unjust and unfair thing to do. Your religion will be better off not<\/em> trying to coerce everyone else to obey your religious law, he says:<\/p>\n

The question remains: How can McDonald\u2019s sell cheeseburgers, violating Jewish law? Not a toughie. Answer: Because the laws of kosher don\u2019t matter to anyone but observant Jews. \u2026 Jewish dietary law has no bearing on secular law. Jews, a scant minority, are uninterested in trying to force their arcane practices upon non-believers. \u2026<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>Anti-gay Christians are now approaching their cheeseburger moment \u2014 welcome, welcome \u2014 after the Supreme Court has tossed out much of the Defense of Marriage Act and California\u2019s Proposition 8. The legal whip drops from the fundamentalist hand, which strikes them as oppression, forgetting they can still practice whatever private dogma they like regarding gays \u2014 never marry their own gender, disown their own gay children \u2014 but gay marriage is going up on the menu in more and more states. Society is marching \u2014 running, really \u2014 off without them, into a future of gay folk living openly without fear.<\/p>\n

It hurts, bubbie, I know. Here\u2019s a Kleenex.<\/p>\n

You\u2019ll get used to it. Take it from a Jew. You get used to the world not singing along with your religious peccadilloes. (Not that keeping kosher and discriminating against gays are comparable, except as religiously inspired irrational acts). No harm in cleaving to your faith in the midst of a carnival of all you don\u2019t believe. At Christmas, it isn\u2019t like I suffer through all these foreign practices \u2014 caroling, wassailing, midnight massing. I accept them with humility \u2014 it\u2019s not my party, but it\u2019s someone\u2019s party. It isn\u2019t all about me.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

That\u2019s an astute point, but it\u2019s likely to fall on deaf ears among the sort of Christians who have half-convinced themselves that being wished \u201cHappy Holidays\u201d at the mall constitutes a form of religious persecution. \u201cIt isn\u2019t all about me\u201d isn\u2019t likely to get through to the foot soldiers of the \u201cWar on Christmas.\u201d<\/p>\n

Steinberg contends with a typically mendacious statement from the Liar Tony Perkins, then wraps up with this:<\/p>\n

There is a bedrock truth below all this, one that would have been unchanged no matter what the court ruled: Gay people don\u2019t make worse spouses, or parents, or friends. If they did, chuckleheads like Perkins would wave any scrap of evidence like a flag. But there is none, so bigots have to try to twist these advances into some kind of religious oppression \u2014 that hating gays is a bedrock of Christian faith and to try to change that is persecution.<\/p>\n

Good luck with that one. Ask the next rabbi you see if he feels oppressed because the United States government doesn\u2019t enforce Jewish dietary laws. He\u2019ll take a step back \u2014 distancing himself from the crazy person \u2014 and say, \u201cNo, and believe me, we know what real oppression is.\u201d That\u2019s where Perkins et al.<\/em> will be in 50 years, only their privately held torch will not be a harmless dietary quirk, but a shameful, refuted hatred gilded with a thin, worn and crumbling veneer of faith.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

That same twisted claim \u2014 \u201cthat hating gays is a bedrock of Christian faith and to try to change that is persecution\u201d \u2014 also concerns Dave Gushee in his recent Religion Dispatches essay, \u201cChristians v. Gays: The Damage Done<\/a>.\u201d<\/p>\n

Gushee acknowledges the primary damage \u2014 that being done to<\/em> others\u00a0by<\/em> Christians, but his focus here is on the secondary damage. He\u2019s talking about the damage done to the church as a consequence of its choosing to be a source of damage for others. He\u2019s talking about the damage of allowing our faith to be reduced to a \u201cthin, worn and crumbling veneer\u201d laid atop a \u201cshameful, refuted hatred.\u201d<\/p>\n

Gushee summarizes that damage in five bullet points:<\/p>\n

\u2022\u00a0Christians (understood to mean here heterosexual activist traditionalists) have become identified with actively pursuing the denial of rights and benefits to others that they themselves enjoy. In other words, the \u201cGospel\u201d has been identified with the cause of self-benefiting social discrimination against a minority group, a losing hand if ever there was one.<\/p>\n

\u2022\u00a0Christians, claiming to follow Jesus, have become identified as the chief enemies of gay and lesbian human beings (some of whom are also Christians), and of the moral and legal rights of lesbians and gays, whereas Jesus\u2019 enemies tended to be people who performed exactly this kind of marginalization on the despised ones of their era.<\/p>\n

\u2022\u00a0Christians have become known for a deeply distorted moral agenda by elevating the anti-gay cause to the top of their public ethics, and this in a world afflicted by war, hunger, ecological disaster and all manner of social injustice.<\/p>\n

\u2022\u00a0Christians have alienated gays and lesbians and their families, friends, and sympathetic allies, driving many away from the love of Jesus Christ and contributing to the secularization of American culture. They have done a great deal to create hostility to the church and closed ears to the Gospel. The saddest cases are the church\u2019s own rejected gay and lesbian adolescents and twentysomethings. They are legion.<\/p>\n

\u2022\u00a0Christians have contributed to the fear in society that millions of Americans are unable to tell the difference between the church and the state, or between the demands of their faith on themselves vs. the demands of their faith on those who do not share it.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I wish I shared Dave\u2019s confidence that \u201cself-benefiting discrimination against a minority group\u201d is always a losing hand. In the long run, yes, the arc bends toward justice, but in the shorter run of a generation\u2019s life-span, privilege using power to defend itself often succeeds. I\u2019m not saying it\u2019s not evil<\/em>, mind you \u2014 \u201cself-benefiting discrimination\u201d against the powerless is pretty much the definition<\/em> of evil \u2014 but in a fallen world, selfish evil isn\u2019t always a losing hand.<\/p>\n

But Gushee\u2019s point there \u2014 that equating the Gospel of Jesus Christ with such \u201cself-benefiting discrimination\u201d is obscene \u2014 is dead on.<\/p>\n

He predicts three likely ways Christians will respond to the recent Supreme Court decisions and to future victories for LGBT equality:<\/p>\n

One is to dig in their heels and resist every step of the way, with continuing damages along the lines just indicated, and all this in an increasingly hopeless cause.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

He doesn\u2019t seem to be recommending that one. Because, again \u2014 evil<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Another is to draw a clearer distinction between church and state, and between moral and legal norms, deciding that the place to defend and practice traditional Christian beliefs about marriage is in the church, not the state.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Did I mention that Dave Gushee is a Baptist? You might have guessed that already based on that earlier bit chiding Christians who are \u201cunable to tell the difference between the church and the state, or between the demands of their faith on themselves vs. the demands of their faith on those who do not share it.\u201d This second, eminently Baptist<\/em>, response seems to be part of Gushee\u2019s prescription, but not the whole of it.<\/p>\n

The third is to be open to rethinking the possibility that the core Christian norms of love, justice, and hospitality must be integrated with moral norms related specifically to sexual ethics.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Yes, please, a bit of that too, thank you.<\/p>\n

I\u2019m not entirely sure what moral norms could exist or survive\u00a0dis<\/em>-integrated from love, justice and hospitality, but that is the weird situation now facing much of the church. We\u2019ve got some vague notion of \u201cspecifically\u201d sexual ethics that somehow exists wholly apart from love, justice, hospitality and their corollaries and kin, such as consent, trust, fidelity, mutuality, magnanimity, honesty, kindness, joy, etc.<\/p>\n

Those, somehow, are not regarded as integral to \u201csexual morality\u201d or to Christian sexual ethics, which is what makes our idea of sexual ethics so confused and confusing \u2014 an arbitrary set of lines and laws and Rules for Other People. Clanging brass and tinkling cymbals.<\/p>\n

The folks Gushee is desperately trying to reach here will likely view this third option as a call to something radically new, but really his call for \u201crethinking the possibility\u201d here is an attempt to get them to remember something old \u2014 something that they seem to have forgotten.<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

From Neil Steinberg: “Ask the next rabbi you see if he feels oppressed because the United States government doesn\u2019t enforce Jewish dietary laws. He\u2019ll take a step back \u2014 distancing himself from the crazy person \u2014 and say, ‘No, and believe me, we know what real oppression is.'”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":141,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[13,17,53,52,99,61],"class_list":["post-16137","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-evangelicals","tag-church-state","tag-equality","tag-gay-rights","tag-homosexuality","tag-persecuted-hegemons","tag-tltp"],"yoast_head":"\nNeil Steinberg & Dave Gushee on the damaging idea that 'hating gays is a bedrock of Christian faith'<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"From Neil Steinberg: "Ask the next rabbi you see if he feels oppressed because the United States government doesn\u2019t enforce Jewish dietary laws. 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A former managing editor of Prism magazine, Fred worked in the parachurch nonprofit world for a decade and then for a decade in the newspaper biz. He began blogging in 2002. In 2003 he began writing a review of the best-selling Left Behind series. Eight years later he still hasn\u2019t finished reviewing the second book of that series and the experience has left him a broken shell of a man. Fred knows the difference between the possessive \u201cits\u201d and the contraction \u201cit\u2019s,\u201d and he is acutely bothered when others mistakenly confuse the two, yet he himself just kind of instinctively types the apostrophe whether or not it belongs there. Some feel this is his greatest hypocrisy, but those who know him better know better. He\u2019s guilty of much greater hypocrisies. Jesus loves Fred far more than Fred loves Jesus, but he at least has the decency to recognize the unfairness of that lopsided relationship and he has long wished that he were better at maybe kind of sort of doing something more to correct that some day. A Baptist, an amateur, a Gen-Xer, a Gemini and a Mets fan, Fred lives in Southeastern Pennsylvania with his wife and two teenage daughters. You can reach him via email at slacktivist at hotmail dot com.\",\"url\":\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/author\/fredclark1\/\"}]}<\/script>\n<!-- \/ Yoast SEO plugin. -->","yoast_head_json":{"title":"Neil Steinberg & Dave Gushee on the damaging idea that 'hating gays is a bedrock of Christian faith'","description":"From Neil Steinberg: \"Ask the next rabbi you see if he feels oppressed because the United States government doesn\u2019t enforce Jewish dietary laws. 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A former managing editor of Prism magazine, Fred worked in the parachurch nonprofit world for a decade and then for a decade in the newspaper biz. He began blogging in 2002. In 2003 he began writing a review of the best-selling Left Behind series. Eight years later he still hasn\u2019t finished reviewing the second book of that series and the experience has left him a broken shell of a man. Fred knows the difference between the possessive \u201cits\u201d and the contraction \u201cit\u2019s,\u201d and he is acutely bothered when others mistakenly confuse the two, yet he himself just kind of instinctively types the apostrophe whether or not it belongs there. Some feel this is his greatest hypocrisy, but those who know him better know better. He\u2019s guilty of much greater hypocrisies. Jesus loves Fred far more than Fred loves Jesus, but he at least has the decency to recognize the unfairness of that lopsided relationship and he has long wished that he were better at maybe kind of sort of doing something more to correct that some day. A Baptist, an amateur, a Gen-Xer, a Gemini and a Mets fan, Fred lives in Southeastern Pennsylvania with his wife and two teenage daughters. You can reach him via email at slacktivist at hotmail dot com.","url":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/author\/fredclark1\/"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16137","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/141"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=16137"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16137\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=16137"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=16137"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=16137"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}